Replace a string located between

Question

Here is my problem: in a variable that is text and contains commas, I try to delete only the commas located between two strings (in fact [ and ]).

Answer 1

If you don't fancy learning regular expressions (see other responses on this page), you can use the partition command.

sentence = "the quick, brown [fox, jumped , over] the lazy dog"
left, bracket, rest = sentence.partition("[")
block, bracket, right = rest.partition("]")

"block" is now the part of the string in between the brackets, "left" is what was to the left of the opening bracket and "right" is what was to the right of the opening bracket.

You can then recover the full sentence with:

new_sentence = left + "[" + block.replace(",","") + "]" + right
print new_sentence # the quick, brown [fox jumped over] the lazy dog

If you have more than one block, you can put this all in a for loop, applying the partition command to "right" at every step.

Or you could learn regular expressions! It will be worth it in the long run.