Extracting specific range of text from a file

Question

I'm trying to help my wife out with reviewing documents for work - the paragraphs of notes have different catagories that I am trying to extract as seperate strings to save to a different text file so that I can do other things to them later. An example paragraph is:

Observations of Client Behavior: Overall interfering behavior data trends are as followed: THIS IS THE DESIRED TEXT. Observations of Client's response to skill acquisition: Overall skill acquisition data trends ....

and Im trying to extract just the text between "Overall interfering behavior data trends are as followed:" to right before "Observations of Client's response to skill acquisition:"

I've experimented with regex with no success, any help in direction would be much appreciated, thanks!

the text Overall interfering behavior does not appear in the example paragraph. please elaborate. — Hadar
– Hadar, Commented Oct 2, 2021 at 11:59
Thats because I accidentally deleted it - oops. Ill edit it now, thank you! — SSerb1989
– SSerb1989, Commented Oct 2, 2021 at 12:00
not sure how structured the text is. for example, if there's only one sentence in the part which you wish to extract, and such sentence ends with a "." and starts with a ":", you could in theory use text.split(":")[1].split(".")[0] — Hadar
– Hadar, Commented Oct 2, 2021 at 12:04

Balaji · Accepted Answer · 2021-10-02 12:25:45Z

1

Taken reference from this post Regular expression to return all characters between two special characters

import re

file = open("filename.txt", "r") # Insert the file name here

pat = r'.*?Overall interfering behavior data trends are as followed:(.*)Observations of Client\'s response to skill acquisition:.*'
match = re.search(pat, line)

for line in file:
    print(match.group(1).strip())

Gives output

'THIS IS THE DESIRED TEXT.'

edited Oct 2, 2021 at 12:25

answered Oct 2, 2021 at 12:06

Balaji

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1 Comment

SSerb1989 Over a year ago

This is a great step! I'm trying to pass a .txt file in as the "example_str" - but I am getting print(match.group(1).strip()) AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'group'

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