Something like that should work: import re reg = re.compile('\(.*\)') print reg.sub('','some words (another words)') The regular expression finds all occurences of text between two braces and replaces then with the empty string. Andreas ----- Original Message ----- From: sbergmann@weblog.de To: zope@zope.org Sent: Friday, June 29, 2001 8:56 AM Subject: [Zope] Extracting a part of a string Hello Zopers, I have the following problem: I have a string from a database and want to delete a part from the string and write it back to the database. An example: a = ' some words ( another words)' I want to extract now everything without the brackets themselves anth the words in the brackets. That should be the result. a = 'some words' How can I do that. With the string-module and "find" I can get the index where the brackets begin. But there is no function to get the string from index 0 to the result index of "find". Is there another way to do this? I´m sure that somebody has a solution for me. Steffen