how to search for a specific from and to keyword in a file and print the sentence in python

Question

I am trying to get a file as an input and search for a special character. I am giving from and to keys as input. if the to keyword is in the next line i should print till the to keyword is found.

for line in contents:

if line.startswith("*CHI: ") :

       line = line.strip("*")
       tokenize = line.split()
       p.token_filter(tokenize)

say i have a file:

       *CHI: (hi) new [/] friend [//] there [/-] [ bch] [ bch ] /[]/ [/=]
<new>
<there>.
%mod: hi there.
*CHI: <dude>
<there>
*CHI: &=sighs <and instead the> [//] and then the gira?e got it and gave it to the elephant . 
*CHI: <he> [/] <he> [/] he hold it .
*CHI: then [/-] the doctor give the [/] money to the man
*CHI: and (i)s then (.) the little (.) gira?e is crying because it (i)s sinking

By using the above code i am getting the output as follows:

['new', '[/]', 'friend', '[//]', 'there', 'bch', '/[]/']
['dude', 'dude']
['and', 'and', 'instead', 'the', 'the', '[//]', 'and', 'then', 'the', 'gira?e', 'got', 'it', 'and', 'gave', 'it', 'to', 'the', 'elephant', '.']
['he', 'he', '[/]', 'he', 'he', '[/]', 'he', 'hold', 'it', '.']
['then', 'the', 'doctor', 'give', 'the', '[/]', 'money', 'to', 'the', 'man']
['and', 'then', '(.)', 'the', 'little', '(.)', 'gira?e', 'is', 'crying', 'because', 'it', 'sinking']

My another aim is i should print ['new', '[/]', 'friend', '[//]', 'there', 'bch', '/[]/' 'new' 'there' '.' ]

Answer 1

for arbitrary text you can use regex:

>>> import re
>>> text = "*foo* bar *foobar*"
>>> re.findall("\*[^/*]*\*", text)
['*foo*', '*foobar*']

To get rid of the asterisks:

>>> [s.replace("*", "") for s in re.findall("\*[^/*]*\*", text)]
['foo', 'foobar']

Answer 2

If you can read the file and convert it into a string. We can use

string = "123123STRINGabcabc"

def find_between( string, first, last ):
    try:
        start = string.index( first ) + len( first )
        end = string.index( last, start )
        return string[start:end]
    except ValueError:
        return ""

print find_between( string, "123", "abc" )

gives

123STRING