Hello everyone,

When I am coding in Python I often encounter situations where I have a string like this one.

sample="""
fruit:apple
tree:[Apple tree]
quantity:{5}
quantity:{3}
"""

And I want to grab some kind of value from it.

So let me introduce you to the grab function. This is the definition:

def grab(start, end, list_out=False):

Now, if you want to get the fruit from the sample string you can just "grab" it as follows:

sample.grab(start="fruit:", end="\n")
>> 'apple'

You can also "grab" values enclosed in brackets or in any kind of character and It works as you would expect.

sample.grab(start="tree:[", end="]")
>> 'Apple tree'

The optional argument "list_out" makes the function return a list of values, for cases where there are several of them to grab.

sample.grab(start="quantity:{", end="}", list_out=True)
>> [5, 3]

The "grab" function will return only the first occurrence if "list_out" is omitted or passed as False.

sample.grab(start="quantity:{", end="}")
>> 5

sample.grab(start="quantity:{", end="}", list_out=False)
>> 5

As you can see, it is incredibly useful for extracting substrings from a larger and more complex string and can change the way we parse strings for the better.

For example, it could simplify the way we parse the fields of HTTP headers. It also has many applications for the parsing of configuration files and the construction of strings for SQL queries and bash commands among others.

I have implemented this function locally to use it for my personal projects and It has proven to be really useful in practice, so I hope you find it useful as well and consider adding it as a class method for strings in Python.

Julio Cabria
Engineering student
Autonomous University of Madrid