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I have a string in Python, and I need to extract a substring from it. The substring I need to extract is between two specific characters in the string. The string is of indeterminate length and value, so slicing at specific points does not work in this case. How can I achieve this?

For example, suppose I have the string "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". I want to extract the substring between the characters "q" and "o", which is "uick br". How can I do this using Python? I've tried using the find() function, but I'm not sure how to extract the substring once I've found the positions of the characters.

xentoo
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    `string[string.find('q'):string.find('o')+1]` – marmeladze Feb 26 '23 at 14:14
  • @AbdulAzizBarkat - The string is not strictly known, so slicing by position doesn't look like the way to go. Thanks for the comment though. – xentoo Feb 26 '23 at 14:21
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    @marmeladze - That looks like you're on the money with that response! I'll have a play and see if I can make it work for my use case. Thank you! – xentoo Feb 26 '23 at 14:21
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    @xentoo of course slicing at specific points would work, the specific points being the result of `.index`, as shown in the comment by marmeladze, which you acknowledged. – mkrieger1 Feb 26 '23 at 14:29
  • @mkrieger1 - I was referring to the numeric values used in the question Abdul had linked to and hadn't thought of slicing with the method marmeladze gaave as an example. – xentoo Feb 26 '23 at 14:36
  • @xentoo I linked the question assuming you can get the indexes needed as you already mentioned you can get them... Otherwise I would have probably linked some regex question. See: [How to extract the substring between two markers?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4666973/how-to-extract-the-substring-between-two-markers) – Abdul Aziz Barkat Feb 26 '23 at 14:46

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If you sure there is at least one sub-string existing between two specified characters, it's able to use regex functions, particularly search. The function returns a group of matches. You can pick one from the group or travel through the group and select ones as your needs.

Below is an example of finding a substring between two specified characters q and o.

str = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
sub = re.search("q(.+?)o",str).groups()[0]
print(sub)
TaQuangTu
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