Print words in between two keywords

Question

I am trying to write a code in Python where I get a print out of all the words in between two keywords.

scenario = "This is a test to see if I can get Python to print out all the words in between Python and words"

go = False

start = "Python"

end = "words"

for line in scenario:
    if start in line: go = True
    elif end in line:
      go = False
      continue
    if go: print(line)

Want to have a print out of "to print out all the"

Possible duplicate of [Find string between two substrings](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3368969/find-string-between-two-substrings) — Sayse, Aug 26 '19 at 18:47

TomNash · Answer 1 · 2019-08-26T19:07:35.523

2

Slightly different approach, let's create a list which each element being a word in the sentence. Then let's use list.index() to find which position in the sentence the start and end words first occur. We can then return the words in the list between those indices. We want it back as a string and not a list, so we join them together with a space.

# list of words ['This', 'is', 'a', 'test', ...]
words = scenario.split()

# list of words between start and end ['to', 'print', ..., 'the']
matching_words = words[words.index(start)+1:words.index(end)]

# join back to one string with spaces between
' '.join(matching_words)

Result:

to print out all the

edited Aug 26 '19 at 19:07

answered Aug 26 '19 at 18:45

TomNash

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1

Nice answer! Simple and to the point!, although just so the output is a string not a list of strings, shouldn’t the last line be encapsulated in `' '.join(...)`? – Jab Aug 26 '19 at 18:57
Good catch, added and explained. – TomNash Aug 26 '19 at 19:07

tanvi · Answer 2 · 2019-08-26T19:22:29.537

Split the string and go over it word by word to find the index at which the two keywords occur. Once you have those two indices, combine the list between those indices into a string.

scenario = 'This is a test to see if I can get Python to print out all the words in between Python and words'
start_word = 'Python'
end_word = 'words'

# Split the string into a list
list = scenario.split()

# Find start and end indices
start = list.index(start_word) + 1
end = list.index(end_word)

# Construct a string from elements at list indices between `start` and `end`
str = ' '.join(list[start : end])

# Print the result
print str

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 26 '19 at 18:45

Your initial problem is that you're iterating over scenario the string, instead of splitting it into seperate words, (Use scenario.split()) but then there are other issues about switching to searching for the end word once the start has been found, instead, you might like to use index to find the two strings and then slice the string

scenario = "This is a test to see if I can get Python to print out all the words in between Python and words"
start = "Python"
end = "words"

start_idx = scenario.index(start)
end_idx = scenario.index(end)

print(scenario[start_idx + len(start):end_idx].strip())

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 26 '19 at 18:46

You can accomplish this with a simple regex

import re

txt = "This is a test to see if I can get Python to print out all the words in between Python and words"
x = re.search("(?<=Python\s).*?(?=\s+words)", txt)

Here is the regex in action --> REGEX101

Print words in between two keywords

4 Answers4