How to remove strings from in between brackets with regex...python -

i need pull out single string containing words extracted fields:

[[cat]][[dog]][[mouse]][[apple]][[banana]][[pear]][[plum]][[pool]] 

so need: cat dog mouse apple banana pear plum pool.

i've been trying 2 hours make regular expression this.

the best (?<=[[]\s)(.*)(?=]]) gets me:

cat]][[dog]][[mouse]][[apple]][[banana]][[pear]][[plum]][[pool 

any ideas? thanks!

here's solution re.finditer. let string s. assumes there can in between [[ , ]]. otherwise, comment @noob applies.

>>> [x.group(1) x in re.finditer('\[\[(.*?)\]\]', s)] ['cat', 'dog', 'mouse', 'apple', 'banana', 'pear', 'plum', 'pool'] 

alternatively, lookarounds , re.findall:

>>> re.findall('(?<=\[\[).*?(?=\]\])', s) ['cat', 'dog', 'mouse', 'apple', 'banana', 'pear', 'plum', 'pool'] 

for large strings, finditer version seemed faster when timed alternatives.

in [5]: s=s*1000 in [6]: timeit [x.group(1) x in re.finditer('\[\[(.*?)\]\]', s)] 100 loops, best of 3: 3.61 ms per loop in [7]: timeit re.findall('(?<=\[\[).*?(?=\]\])', s) 100 loops, best of 3: 5.93 ms per loop