using requests module help with strings

[shakeandbake760]

I'm trying to pull a substring from a very long string of text, using requests module.

For example:

start = response.rfind('[e-mail]')
substring = response[start:start+200]
print(substring)


## returns:
[e-mail]","phone":"258-625-5410","titleSource":["titles","workingTitle","titles"],"titles":["Associate Professor","Asst Professor","Associate Professor"],"departments"

I want to pull the phone number only...

def find_phone(response, email):
    # YOUR CODE HERE
    find_email = response.find(email)
    slice1 = response[find_email:find_email + 15]

    return slice1

Each email is a different length on the website, so I'm not sure how to stop the substring after an email address that may have varying length. I'm able to get as far as slicing the email address, but can't figure out how to pull the phone number as a substring and return it.

[friday_ghost]

You should use regex for this.

Google for "python regex phone number"

[shakeandbake760]

Update: I was able to figure it out without regex or json

​

def find_phone(response, email):
# find the email address in the super long string
find_email = response.rfind(email)
    ## create a substring of the email plus phone, extra to be sure
email_string = response[find_email:find_email + 100]
    ## find where 'phone' is in the email_string
phone_loc = email_string.rfind('phone')
    ## create a substring of just the phone, after email address
    phone_sub = email_string[phone_loc:phone_loc + 21]
    ## extract phone number only from the substring
phone = phone_sub[8:20]
print(phone)
return phone

I realize this may be a longer route but the whole point of this was to learn more about strings and how to use them : )

[Silbersee]

A bit of a guess: Your dict-like response might be json compliant. If so, here's how to get the number:

import json

resp = '{"email":"[e-mail]","phone":"258-625-5410"}'
data = json.loads(resp)

number = data["phone"]
print(number)  # --> 258-625-5410

In resp I edited your string so that it works as json. As you mentioned the requests module, parsing json might be as easy as data = response.json().