Python String stripping and splitting

If the data is indeed formated like that:

    import re
    i = [the listed string] 
    names = [j.strip('[') for j in re.findall("\w+\[\.*", i)]

Output:

['Cube1', 'Ground', 'Cube3', 'Cube4', 'Sphere', 'OilTank', 'Cube2']

If you just need the left-most portion, I would use:

name, _ = line.split("[", 1)

If you need something more complex, I'd look into using regular expressions with the re module… Let me know and I can suggest something.

>>> mess = 'Cube1[visible:true, mode:Normal]{r:Cube1.R, g:Cube1.G, b:Cube1.B, a:Cube1.A},\nGround[visible:true, mode:Normal]{r:Ground.R, g:Ground.G, b:Ground.B, a:Ground.A},\nCube3[visible:true, mode:Normal]{r:Cube3.R, g:Cube3.G, b:Cube3.B, a:Cube3.A},\nCube4[visible:true, mode:Normal]{r:Cube4.R, g:Cube4.G, b:Cube4.B, a:Cube4.A},\nSphere[visible:true, mode:Normal]{r:Sphere.R, g:Sphere.G, b:Sphere.B, a:Sphere.A},\nOilTank[visible:true, mode:Normal]{r:OilTank.R, g:OilTank.G, b:OilTank.B, a:OilTank.A},\nCube2[visible:true, mode:Normal]{r:Cube2.R, g:Cube2.G, b:Cube2.B, a:Cube2.A}'
>>> names = "\n".join(line.split("[", 1)[0] for line in mess.split("\n"))
>>> print names
Cube1
Ground
Cube3
Cube4
Sphere
OilTank
Cube2

I don't know a lot about python, but my thoughts in terms of logic would be this:

1. Split on the comma character
2. Loop on the resulting array and cut off everything after the first '[' using substring(indexOf) or similar python manipulation.
3. Then loop though the array again to concatenate the strings back together.

Sorry I don't know the specific commands for doing this. Hope it helps!

Regexes are unecessary, assuming that really is the exact format of your data.

[i.split('[', 1)[0] for i in lst]

With string split:

names = [ x.split('[')[0] for x in your_text.split('\n') ]

With regular expressions:

import re
names = re.findall(r'^\w+', your_text, re.MULTILINE)