Regex: match sequence of not a certain string

Question

s = 'blah blah blah... _ABC_superman_is_cool_CBA_ ...blah blah blah...'

This is just an example, but I want to match everything between _ABC_ and _CBA_. So 'superman_is_cool'. There may be multiple sections of _ABC_..._CBA_.

re.findall('_ABC_(.*)(?=_CBA_)', s)

I tried this first, but obviously doesn't correctly work at all.

Answer 1

I added an additional _ABC_, _CBA_ pair to make sure it finds all the matches:

>>> s = 'blah blah blah... _ABC_superman_is_cool_CBA_ ...blah blah _ABC_blah_CBA_...'
>>> re.findall('_ABC_(.*?)_CBA_', s)
['superman_is_cool', 'blah']

The ? makes the * operator non-greedy so it finds as short a match as possible. Without it the result would be ['superman_is_cool_CBA_ ...blah blah _ABC_blah'].

Answer 2

Try this

re.findall('_ABC_.*_CBA_)', s)