Extract all words between two keywords in .txt file (Python)

[Joel Goldstick]

On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 1:31 PM Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet at bsb.me.uk> wrote:
>
> A S <aishan0403 at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > I would like to extract all words within specific keywords in a .txt
> > file. For the keywords, there is a starting keyword of "PROC SQL;" (I
> > need this to be case insensitive) and the ending keyword could be
> > either "RUN;", "quit;" or "QUIT;". This is my sample .txt file.
> >
> > Thus far, this is my code:
> >
> > with open('lan sample text file1.txt') as file:
> >     text = file.read()
> >     regex = re.compile(r'(PROC SQL;|proc sql;(.*?)RUN;|quit;|QUIT;)')
> >     k = regex.findall(text)
> >     print(k)
>
> Try
>
>   re.compile(r'(?si)(PROC SQL;.*(?:QUIT|RUN);)')
>
> Read up one what (?si) means and what (?:...) means..  You can do the
> same by passing flags to the compile method.
>
> > Output:
> >
> > [('quit;', ''), ('quit;', ''), ('PROC SQL;', '')]
>
> Your main issue is that | binds weakly.  Your whole pattern tries to
> match any one of just four short sub-patterns:
>
> PROC SQL;
> proc sql;(.*?)RUN;
> quit;
> QUIT;
>
> --
> Ben.
> --
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

Consider using python string functions.

1. read your string, lets call it s.
2 . start = s.find("PROC SQL:"
 This will find the starting index point.  It returns and index
3. DO the same for each of the three possible ending  strings.  Use if/else
4. This will give you your ending index.
5 slice the included string, taking into account the start is start +
len("PROC SQL;") and the end is the ending index - the length of
whichever string ended in your case

Regular expressions are powerful, but not so easy to read unless you
are really into them.
-- 
Joel Goldstick
http://joelgoldstick.com/blog
http://cc-baseballstats.info/stats/birthdays