I have some string data that are in <> that I would like to convert to a list-CodePudding

The string comes in as "<item1><item2><item3>"

I would like to convert it to ['item1','item2','item3']

I was thinking of using string.split('><') and then stripping out the first < and the last >.

But this wouldn't work well if the string has things in front or after it or if there is a space in between the '>' and the '<'. Is there another way?

CodePudding user response：

Use regex with a capturing group ()

import re

s = '<item1><item2><item3>'
re.findall('<(\w )>', s)

Output

['item1', 'item2', 'item3']

CodePudding user response：

You can use this regular expression if your strings (item1, item2, etc.) don't contain a < or >

Regex: (Try it on Regex101)

<(.*?)>

Explanation:

<       Match a literal <
 (   )  Capturing group
  .*?   Match any character, any number of times using a lazy match
      > Match a literal >

To run this with python, do:

import re

s = '<item1><item2><item3>'
re.findall('<(.*?)>', s)

Which gives your expected output

['item1', 'item2', 'item3']