Extract data from string, leaving out a pattern

Question

I'm totally new to regular expressions and I'm trying to get something like this:

["Group", "s1", "s2", "Group2"]

from a string:

string = "_GRP_Group||s1||s2||Group2||"

All I have now is:

word = re.findall(r'([^\|]+)', string)

which just leaves out the pipe and I get this:

['_GRP_Group', 's1', 's2', 'Group2']

Is there a way to get rid of the _GRP_ prefix?

Answer 1

Based on your comments on other answers, it sounds like the _GRP_ prefix is a prefix to the string rather than to each individual split value?

Try this:

string = "_GRP_Group||s1||s2||Group2||"
word = re.findall(r"(?:_GRP_)?([^|]+)", string)

Answer 2

You don't need to use regular expressions to split the first string by || or remove the prefix _GRP_ . You can just use split and slicing:

words = "_GRP_Group||s1||s2||Group2||"[5:].split('||')

The slice [5:] will exclude the first five characters from the string.
If you didn't know where _GRP_ would occur, you could use replace :

words = "_GRP_Group||s1||s2||Group2||".split('||')
words = [word.replace("_GRP_", "") for word in words]