How do i extract specific characters from elements in a list in python?

Question

['PRE user_1/\n', '2016-11-30 11:43:32 62944 UserID-12345.jpg\n', '2016-11-28 10:07:24 29227 anpr.jpg\n', '2016-11-30 11:38:30 62944 image.jpg\n']

I have a list of string and i want to extract the 'name\n' part from each element and store it. For example i want to extract 'name\n' from mylist[0], where mylist[0] = 'PRE user_/n'. So user_1/ will be extracted and stored in a variable.

 mylist = ['PRE user_1/\n', '2016-11-30 11:43:32      62944 UserID-12345.jpg\n', '2016-11-28 10:07:24      29227 anpr.jpg\n', '2016-11-30 11:38:30      62944 image.jpg\n']
 for x in mylist:
     i = 0
     userid = *extract the 'name\n' from mylist[i]
     print userid
     i = i+1

How do i do this? Is Regular Expressions the way to do it?, if yes how do i implement it? A code snippet would be very helpful.

Answer 1

Maybe you can do it without regex. You can try my solution:

a = ['PRE user_1/\n', '2016-11-30 11:43:32      62944 UserID-12345.jpg\n', '2016-11-28 10:07:24      29227 anpr.jpg\n', '2016-11-30 11:38:30      62944 image.jpg\n']

def get_name(arg = ""):
    b = arg.split(" ")
    for i in b:
        if "\n" in i:
            return i.replace("\n", "")

Output:

print get_name(a[0])
user_1/
print get_name(a[1])
UserID-12345.jpg
print get_name(a[2])
anpr.jpg
print get_name(a[3])
image.jpg

Also in order to fill the example you gave, your code will be:

for x in a:
    userid = get_name(x)
    print userid

Output:

user_1/
UserID-12345.jpg
anpr.jpg
image.jpg