# Text extract between

`text-extract-between` · version 1.0.0 · Text · free, no key needed

Extract exact substrings between start and end markers, left to right and non-overlapping.

**Use when you need to: text extract between · extract text between markers · substring between start and end markers.**

## Supported

- text extract between
- extract text between markers
- substring between start and end markers

## Not supported

- regular expressions
- nested or balanced delimiters
- case-insensitive search
- overlapping matches
- grapheme cluster matching
- read files

## Behavior

- text is a UTF-8 bounded string of at most 250 KiB. Empty text yields matches [] and truncated false.
- start and end are non-empty literal strings of at most 4096 UTF-8 bytes. They may be equal.
- Search is exact UTF-16 code-unit equality, left to right, without regex, case folding, or Unicode normalization.
- After a complete match, search continues after the end marker so matches never overlap. Nested markers inside a match are not treated as new starts.
- If start equals end, each pair of consecutive occurrences yields the contents between them, which may be empty.
- If a start marker is found and no end marker follows it, the tool throws unclosed start marker.
- max_matches is a JSON integer 1..1000 and defaults to 100. At most that many matches are returned.
- truncated is true when at least one further complete match exists after max_matches were collected; exceeding the cap does not throw.

## Input

- `text` (string, required): max length 256000
- `start` (string, required): min length 1; max length 4096
- `end` (string, required): min length 1; max length 4096
- `max_matches` (integer, optional): min 1; max 1000

## Output

- `matches` (array of string, required): max items 1000
- `truncated` (boolean, required)

## Limits

- max text bytes: 256000
- max marker bytes: 4096
- default max matches: 100
- max matches: 1000

## Example

Request input:

```json
{
  "text": "pre[one]mid[two]post",
  "start": "[",
  "end": "]"
}
```

Response:

```json
{
  "result": {
    "matches": [
      "one",
      "two"
    ],
    "truncated": false
  }
}
```

## How to call it

### MCP

Connect `https://computefirst.net/mcp` ([setup](/docs#connect)), then call `execute` with:

```json
{
  "id": "text-extract-between",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "input": {
    "text": "pre[one]mid[two]post",
    "start": "[",
    "end": "]"
  }
}
```

### HTTP (no key)

```sh
curl -X POST https://computefirst.net/v1/tools/text-extract-between/versions/1.0.0/execute \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"text":"pre[one]mid[two]post","start":"[","end":"]"}'
```

The machine-readable contract is at [/v1/tools/text-extract-between/versions/1.0.0](/v1/tools/text-extract-between/versions/1.0.0).

### CLI

```sh
node cli.mjs run text-extract-between 1.0.0 --input input.json --base-url https://computefirst.net
```

Get the client at [/clients/cli/](/clients/cli/).

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- [Text parse unified patch](/tools/text-parse-unified-patch): Parse a one-file unified patch into path names and 0-based hunks.
- [Text replace exact](/tools/text-replace-exact): Replace exact UTF-16 substrings without regex, case folding, or Unicode normalization.
- [Text slice codepoints](/tools/text-slice-codepoints): Slice a string by Unicode code-point indexes, not UTF-16 code units.
- [Text split exact](/tools/text-split-exact): Split text on an exact literal separator and reject results that exceed max_parts.
- [Text three way merge](/tools/text-three-way-merge): Three-way merge of text line records with merge or diff3 conflict markers.