Develop Reference

Python: Using .isalpha() to count specific words/characters in a word count

I've created a function which can count specific words or characters in a text file.
But I want to create a condition where the function only counts a character if it is surrounded by letters. For example in the text file.
'This test is an example, this text doesn't have any meaning. It is only an example.'
If I were to run this text through my function, testing for the count of apostrophes ('), it will return 3. However I want it to return 1, only for apostrophes within 2 letter characters (e.g isn't or won't), but I want it to ignore every other apostrophe, such a single quotes, that aren't surrounded in letters.
I've tried to use the .isalpha() method but am having trouble with the syntax.

I think regular expressions would be better for this, but if you must use isalpha, something like:
s = "'This test is an example, this text doesn't have any meaning. It is only an example.'"
sum(s[i-1].isalpha() and s[i]=="'" and s[i+1].isalpha() for i in range(1,len(s)-1))
returns 1.

If you just want to discount the quotes that are enclosing the string itself, the easiest way might be just to strip those off the string before counting.
>>> text = "'This test is an example, this text doesn't have any meaning. It is only an example.'"
>>> text.strip("'").count("'")
1
Another way would be with a regular expression like \w'\w, i.e. letter, followed by ', followed by letter:
>>> sum(1 for _ in re.finditer("\w'\w", text))
1
This also works for quotes inside the string:
>>> text = "Text that has a 'quote' in it."
>>> sum(1 for _ in re.finditer("\w'\w", text))
0
But it will also miss apostrophs that are not followed by another letter:
>>> text = "All the houses' windows were broken."
>>> sum(1 for _ in re.finditer("\w'\w", text))
0

As xnx already noted, the proper way to do this is with regular expressions:
import re
text = "'This test is an example, this text doesn't have any meaning. It is only an example.'"
print(len(re.findall("[a-zA-Z]'[a-zA-Z]", text)))
"""
Out:
1
"""
Here the apostrophe in the pattern is surrounded by the set of English letters, but there are a number of predefined character sets, see the RE docs for details.

You should just use regex:
import re
text = "'This test is an example, this text doesn't have any meaning. It is only an example.'"
wordWrappedApos = re.compile(r"\w'\w")
found = re.findall(wordWrappedApos, text)
print(found)
print(len(found))
Substitute "\w" for "[A-Za-z]" if you want to make sure no numbers are in there.

Python regex for multiple and single dots

I'm currently trying to clean a 1-gram file. Some of the words are as follows:
word - basic word, classical case
word. - basic word but with a dot
w.s.f.w. - (word stands for word) - correct acronym
w.s.f.w - incorrect acronym (missing the last dot)
My current implementation considers two different RegExes because I haven't succeeded in combining them in one. The first RegEx recognises basic words:
find_word_pattern = re.compile(r'[A-Za-z]', flags=re.UNICODE)
The second one is used in order to recognise acronyms:
find_acronym_pattern = re.compile(r'([A-Za-z]+(?:\.))', flags=re.UNICODE)
Let's say that I have an input_word as a sequence of characters. The output is obtained with:
"".join(re.findall(pattern, input_word))
Then I choose which output to use based on the length: the longer the output the better. My strategy works well with case no. 1 where both patterns return the same length.
Case no. 2 is problematic because my approach produces word. (with dot) but I need it to return word (without dot). Currently the case is decided in favour of find_acronym_pattern that produces longer sequence.
The case no. 3 works as expected.
The case no. 4: find_acronym_pattern misses the last character meaning that it produces w.s.f. whereas find_word_pattern produces wsfw.
I'm looking for a RegEx (preferably one instead of two that are currently used) that:
given word returns word
given word. returns word
given w.s.f.w. returns w.s.f.w.
given w.s.f.w returns w.s.f.w.
given m.in returns m.in.

A regular expression will never return what is not there, so you can forget about requirement 5. What you can do is always drop the final period, and add it back if the result contains embedded periods. That will give you the result you want, and it's pretty straightforward:
found = re.findall(r"\w+(?:\.\w+)*", input_word)[0]
if "." in found:
found += "."
As you see I match a word plus any number of ".part" suffixes. Like your version, this matches not only single letter acronyms but longer abbreviations like Ph.D., Prof.Dr., or whatever.

If you want one regex, you can use something like this:
((?:[A-Za-z](\.))*[A-Za-z]+)\.?
And substitute with:
\1\2
Regex demo.
Python 3 example:
import re
regex = r"((?:[A-Za-z](\.))*[A-Za-z]+)\.?"
test_str = ("word\n" "word.\n" "w.s.f.w.\n" "w.s.f.w\n" "m.in")
subst = "\\1\\2"
result = re.sub(regex, subst, test_str, 0, re.MULTILINE)
if result:
print (result)
Output:
word
word
w.s.f.w.
w.s.f.w.
m.in.
Python demo.

Regular expression in Python sentence extractor

I have a script that gives me sentences that contain one of a specified list of key words. A sentence is defined as anything between 2 periods.
Now I want to use it to select all of a sentence like 'Put 1.5 grams of powder in' where if powder was a key word it would get the whole sentence and not '5 grams of powder'
I am trying to figure out how to express that a sentence is between to sequences of period then space. My new filter is:
def iterphrases(text):
return ifilter(None, imap(lambda m: m.group(1), finditer(r'([^\.\s]+)', text)))
However now I no longer print any sentences just pieces/phrases of words (including my key word). I am very confused as to what I am doing wrong.

if you don't HAVE to use an iterator, re.split would be a bit simpler for your use case (custom definition of a sentence):
re.split(r'\.\s', text)
Note the last sentence will include . or will be empty (if text ends with whitespace after last period), to fix that:
re.split(r'\.\s', re.sub(r'\.\s*$', '', text))
also have a look at a bit more general case in the answer for Python - RegEx for splitting text into sentences (sentence-tokenizing)
and for a completely general solution you would need a proper sentence tokenizer, such as nltk.tokenize
nltk.tokenize.sent_tokenize(text)

Here you get it as an iterator. Works with my testcases. It considers a sentence to be anything (non-greedy) until a period, which is followed by either a space or the end of the line.
import re
sentence = re.compile("\w.*?\.(?= |$)", re.MULTILINE)
def iterphrases(text):
return (match.group(0) for match in sentence.finditer(text))

If you are sure that . is used for nothing besides sentences delimiters and that every relevant sentence ends with a period, then the following may be useful:
matches = re.finditer('([^.]*?(powder|keyword2|keyword3).*?)\.', text)
result = [m.group() for m in matches]

Regex? Match part of or whole word

I was wondering if it's possible to use regex with python to capture a word, or a part of the word (if it's at the end of the string).
Eg:
target word - potato
string - "this is a sentence about a potato"
string - "this is a sentence about a potat"
string - "this is another sentence about a pota"
Thanks!

import re
def get_matcher(word, minchars):
reg = '|'.join([word[0:i] for i in range(len(word), minchars - 1, -1)])
return re.compile('(%s)$' % (reg))
matcher = get_matcher('potato', 4)
for s in ["this is a sentence about a potato", "this is a sentence about a potat", "this is another sentence about a pota"]:
print matcher.search(s).groups()
OUTPUT
('potato',)
('potat',)
('pota',)

Dont know how to match a regex in python, but the regex would be:
"\bp$|\bpo$|\bpot$|\bpota$|\bpotat$|\bpotato$"
This would match anything from p to potato if its the last word in the string, and also for example not something like "foopotato", if this is what you want.
The | denotes an alternative, the \b is a "word boundary", so it matches a position (not a character) between a word- and a non-word character. And the $ matches the end of the string (also a position).

Use the $ to match at the end of a string. For example, the following would match 'potato' only at the end of a string (first example):
"potato$"
This would match all of your examples:
"pota[to]{1,2}$"
However, some risk of also matching "potao" or "potaot".

import re
patt = re.compile(r'(p|po|pot|pota|potat|potato)$')
patt.search(string)
I was tempted to use r'po?t?a?t?o?$', but that would also match poto or pott.

No, you can't do that with a regex as far as I know, without pointless (p|po|pot ...) matches which are excessive. Instead, just pick off the last word, and match that using a substring:
match = re.search('\S+$', haystack)
if match.group(0) == needle[:len(match.group(0))]:
# matches.

Searching a string and returning only things I specify

Hopefully this post goes better..
So I am stuck on this feature of this program that will return the whole word where a certain keyword is specified.
ie - If I tell it to look for the word "I=" in the string "blah blah blah blah I=1mV blah blah etc?", that it returns the whole word where it is found, so in this case, it would return I=1mV.
I have tried a bunch of different approaches, such as,
text = "One of the values, I=1mV is used"
print(re.split('I=', text))
However, this returns the same String without I in it, so it would return
['One of the values, ', '1mV is used']
If I try regex solutions, I run into the problem where the number could possibly be more then 1 digit, and so this bottom piece of code only works if the number is 1 digit. If I=10mV was that value, it would only return one, but if i have [/0-9] in twice, the code no longer works with only 1 value.
text = "One of the values, I=1mV is used"
print(re.findall("I=[/0-9]", text))
['I=1']
When I tried using re.match,
text = "One of the values, I=1mV is used"
print(re.search("I=", text))
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x02408BF0>
What is a good way to retrieve the word (In this case, I want to retrieve I=1mV) and cut out the rest of the string?

A better way would be to split the text into words first:
>>> text = "One of the values, I=1mV is used"
>>> words = text.split()
>>> words
['One', 'of', 'the', 'values,', 'I=1mV', 'is', 'used']
And then filter the words to find the one you need:
>>> [w for w in words if 'I=' in w]
['I=1mV']
This returns a list of all words with I= in them. We can then just take the first element found:
>>> [w for w in words if 'I=' in w][0]
'I=1mV'
Done! What we can do to clean this up a bit is to just look for the first match, rather then checking every word. We can use a generator expression for that:
>>> next(w for w in words if 'I=' in w)
'I=1mV'
Of course you could adapt the if condition to fit your needs better, you could for example use str.startswith() to check if the words starts with a certain string or re.match() to check if the word matches a pattern.

Using string methods
For the record, your attempt to split the string in two halves, using I= as the separator, was nearly correct. Instead of using str.split(), which discards the separator, you could have used str.partition(), which keeps it.
>>> my_text = "Loadflow current was I=30.63kA"
>>> my_text.partition("I=")
('Loadflow current was ', 'I=', '30.63kA')
Using regular expressions
A more flexible and robust solution is to use a regular expression:
>>> import re
>>> pattern = r"""
... I= # specific string "I="
... \s* # Possible whitespace
... -? # possible minus sign
... \s* # possible whitespace
... \d+ # at least one digit
... (\.\d+)? # possible decimal part
... """
>>> m = re.search(pattern, my_text, re.VERBOSE)
>>> m
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x044CCFA0>
>>> m.group()
'I=30.63'
This accounts for a lot more possibilities (negative numbers, integer or decimal numbers).
Note the use of:
Quantifiers to say how many of each thing you want.
a* - zero or more as
a+ - at least one a
a? - "optional" - one or zero as
Verbose regular expression (re.VERBOSE flag) with comments - much easier to understand the pattern above than the non-verbose equivalent, I=\s?-?\s?\d+(\.\d+).
Raw strings for regexp patterns, r"..." instead of plain strings "..." - means that literal backslashes don't have to be escaped. Not required here because our pattern doesn't use backslashes, but one day you'll need to match C:\Program Files\... and on that day you will need raw strings.
Exercises
Exercise 1: How do you extend this so that it can match the unit as well? And how do you extend this so that it can match the unit as either mA, A, or kA? Hint: "Alternation operator".
Exercise 2: How do you extend this so that it can match numbers in engineering notation, i.e. "1.00e3", or "-3.141e-4"?

import re
text = "One of the values, I=1mV is used"
l = (re.split('I=', text))
print str(l[1]).split(' ') [0]
if you have more than one I= do the above for each odd index in l sice 0 is the first one.
that is a good way since one can write "One of the values, I= 1mV is used"
and I guess you want to get that I is 1mv.
BTW I is current and its units are Ampers and not Volts :)

With your re.findall attempt you would want to add a + which means one or more.
Here are some examples:
import re
test = "This is a test with I=1mV, I=1.414mv, I=10mv and I=1.618mv."
result = re.findall(r'I=[\d\.]+m[vV]', test)
print(result)
test = "One of the values, I=1mV is used"
result = re.search(r'I=([\d\.]+m[vV])', test)
print(result.group(1))
The first print is: ['I=1mV', 'I=1.414mv', 'I=10mv', 'I=1.618mv']
I've grouped everything other than I= in the re.search example,
so the second print is: 1mV
incase you are interested in extracting that.