Using regular expressions - documentation for further reference

import re

text = 'gfgfdAAA1234ZZZuijjk'

m = re.search('AAA(.+?)ZZZ', text)
if m:
    found = m.group(1)

# found: 1234

or:

import re

text = 'gfgfdAAA1234ZZZuijjk'

try:
    found = re.search('AAA(.+?)ZZZ', text).group(1)
except AttributeError:
    # AAA, ZZZ not found in the original string
    found = '' # apply your error handling

# found: 1234

The code below searches for the first occurence of the ".dwg" string and assigns a new substring (containing characters up to and including that occurence).

text = "Denver.dwg Group Layer\\Denver.dwg Annotation"
ext = ".dwg"

fileNameOnly = text[:text.find(ext) + len(ext)]
print fileNameOnly

This is very basic Python string manipulation. There are loads of quick references which will help you with these most commonly used functions, for example Python Basics, Section 5: Strings.

import re
s = '-1007.88670550662*p**(-1.0) + 67293.8347365694*p**(-0.416543501823503)'
pattern = r'-?\d+\.\d*'  

a,_,b,c = re.findall(pattern,s)
print(a, b, c)

Output

('-1007.88670550662', '67293.8347365694', '-0.416543501823503')

s is your test strings and what not, pattern is the regex pattern, we are looking for floats, and once we find them using findall() we assign them back to a,b,c

Note this method works only if your string is in format of what you've given. else you can play with the pattern to match what you want.

Edit like most people stated in the comments if you need to include a + in front of your positive numbers you can use this pattern r'[-+]?\d+\.\d*'

Get the reverse index after splitting by ||:

>>> L = ["|| [email protected] || awlkdjawldkjalwdkda", "|| [email protected] || awdadwawdawdawdawd"]
>>> for x in L:
...     print x.split('||')[-1].strip()
... 
awlkdjawldkjalwdkda
awdadwawdawdawdawd

If you're allergic to REs, you could use pyparsing:

>>> import pyparsing as p
>>> ope, clo, com = map(p.Suppress, '(),')
>>> w = p.Word(p.alphas)
>>> s = ope + w + com + w + com + ope + p.delimitedList(w) + clo + clo
>>> x = '(xx,yyy,(aa,bb,cc))'
>>> list(s.parseString(x))
['xx', 'yyy', 'aa', 'bb', 'cc']

pyparsing also makes it easy to control the exact form of results (e.g. by grouping the last 3 items into their own sublist), if you want. But I think the nicest aspect is how natural (depending on how much space you want to devote to it) you can make the "grammar specification" read: an open paren, a word, a comma, a word, a comma, an open paren, a delimited list of words, two closed parentheses (if you find the assignment to s above not so easy to read, I guess it's my fault for not choosing longer identifiers;-).