Python: creating a list from a string containing tags

If I have a string containing tags formatted like <@tag> such as:

text = "In this test I tag <@bill>, <@Jennifer>, and lastly <@bob>."

how might I get a python list of the tags extracted for purposes of iterating through the tags.

['bill','Jennifer','bob']

While this is going to be specifically applied to a Slack Chatops Bot I am working on, I left it generic as it might be useful for other things. And I failing at how to for a decent google search to solve it, and the suggested questions in Stack Exchange did not touch on this already..

Thanks! Nick

Solution

You can use regular expressions:

import re
text = "In this test I tag <@bill>, <@Jennifer>, and lastly <@bob>."
print(re.findall('<@(.+?)>', text))  # ['bill', 'Jennifer', 'bob']

Basic explanation:

() denotes a capturing group, i.e. 'extract this part for me'
. means 'any character'
.+ means 'any character one or more times'
.+? means 'any character one or more times, but as few as possible', otherwise it would include the > and many more characters after that:

print(re.findall('<@(.+)>', text)) # ['bill>, <@Jennifer>, and lastly <@bob']