Removing links from a reddit comments using python and regex

Question

I want to remove links in the format Reddit uses

comment = "Hello this is my [website](https://www.google.com)"

no_links = RemoveLinks(comment)

# no_links == "Hello this is my website"

I found a similar question about the same thing, but I don't know how to translate it to python.

I am not that familiar with regex so I would appreciate it if you explained what's happening.

Answer 1

You could do the following:

import re

pattern = re.compile('\[(.*?)\]\(.*?\)')
comment = "Hello this is my [website](https://www.google.com)"

print(pattern.sub(r'\1', comment))

The line:

pattern = re.compile('\[(.*?)\]\(.*?\)')

creates a regex pattern that will search for anything surrounded by square brackets, followed by anything surrounded by parenthesis, the '?' indicates that they should match as little text as possible (non-greedy).

The function sub(r'\1', comment) replaces a match by the first capturing group in this case the text inside the brackets.

For more information about regex I suggest you read this.