Question

I’m trying to remove wiki formatting from some text so it can be parsed.

What is the most pythonic way to remove two delimiters (‘[[‘ and ‘]]’) all the text between them? The given string will contain multiple occurrences of delimiter pairs.

Answer 1

Regular expressions are a good match for your problem.

>>> import re
>>> input_str = 'foo [[bar]] baz [[etc.]]'

If you are wanting to remove the whole [[...]], which is I think what you are asking about,

>>> re.sub(r'\[\[.*?\]\]', '', input_str)
'foo  baz '

If you are wanting to leave the contents of the [[...]] in,

>>> re.sub(r'\[\[(.*?)\]\]', r'\1', input_str)
'foo bar baz etc.'