通过使用正则表达式匹配在两个字符串之间选择文本

Question

I know there are similar posts to get the text between two strings but I couldn't figure out what's wrong with my code even after multiple tries, so I decided to post a question. The text data I am trying to use regex upon looks as follows:

* * *

  

level a20. heading1 random

  

paragraph 1
paragraph 2


paragraph 3
  

* * *

paragraph 4

paragraph 5

* * *

  

level b22. random-heading2

  

someparagraphs...

I aim to get all the text between level a20. heading1 random to * * * level b22. randomheading2. I was able to find the start of the text using

regex = r"^\* \* \*[ \t\n\r\f]+level \S+ heading random"

but when I try to add the rest of the regex, the code fails to grab the text

regex_full = r"^\* \* \*[ \t\n\r\f]+level \S+ heading random(.*?)\* \* \*[ \t\n\r\f]+level \S+ [a-z]+"
re.finditer(regex_full, above_text_data, re.MULTILINE | re.DOTALL)

because I am sure of 'heading random' but in different documents the other heading ('random-heading2') changes, it could even be one word or two works. Can someone please highlight what's the error with the regex_full expression to obtain all the text between level a20. heading1 random to * * * level b22. randomheading2 ? On regex101.com it shows the error as "Your regular expression does not match the subject string."

* * *

  

level a20. heading1 random


TEXT OF INTEREST
* * *
  

level b22. random-heading2

Answer 1

Could be this

r"\\* \\* \\*\\s*level a20\\. heading1 random\\s*(.*?)\\s*\\* \\* \\*\\s*level b22\\. random-heading2"

capture group 1 contains trimmed content.

Answer 2

If you want to select text(including newlines) between two Strings:

(?<=level a20. heading1 random)[\s\S]*?(?=level b22. random-heading2)

May work