Question: Have a set of string as follows

```
text:u'MUC-EC-099_SC-Memory-01_TC-25'
text:u'MUC-EC-099_SC-Memory-01_TC-26'
text:u'MUC-EC-099_SC-Memory-01_TC-27'

```

These data i have extracted from a Xls file and converted to `string`,
now i have to Extract data which is inside single quotes and put them in a list.

expecting output like

```
[MUC-EC-099_SC-Memory-01_TC-25, MUC-EC-099_SC-Memory-01_TC-26,MUC-EC-099_SC-Memory-01_TC-27]

```

Thanks in advance.

Answer: 
You can use the following expression:

```
(?<=')[^']+(?=')

```

This matches zero or more characters that are not `'` which are enclosed between `'` and `'`.

Python Code:

```
quoted = re.compile("(?<=')[^']+(?=')")
for value in quoted.findall(str(row[1])):
    i.append(value)
    print i

```
That `text:` prefix seems a little familiar. Are you using `xlrd` to extract it? In that case, the reason you have the prefix is because you're getting the wrapped `Cell` object, not the value in the cell. For example, I think you're doing something like

```
>>> sheet.cell(2,2)
number:4.0
>>> sheet.cell(3,3)
text:u'C'

```

To get the unwrapped object, use `.value`:

```
>>> sheet.cell(3,3).value
u'C'

```

(Remember that the `u` here is simply telling you the string is unicode; it's not a problem.)