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matching content creating new column

Hello I have a dataset where I want to match my keyword with the location. The problem I am having is the location "Afghanistan" or "Kabul" or "Helmund" I have in my dataset appears in over 150 combinations including spelling mistakes, capitalization and having the city or town attached to its name. What I want to do is create a separate column that returns the value 1 if any of these characters "afg" or "Afg" or "kab" or "helm" or "are contained in the location. I am not sure if upper or lower case makes a difference.
For instance there are hundreds of location combinations like so: Jegdalak, Afghanistan, Afghanistan,Ghazni♥, Kabul/Afghanistan,
I have tried this code and it is good if it matches the phrase exactly but there is too much variation to write every exception down
keywords= ['Afghanistan','Kabul','Herat','Jalalabad','Kandahar','Mazar-i-Sharif', 'Kunduz', 'Lashkargah', 'mazar', 'afghanistan','kabul','herat','jalalabad','kandahar']
#how to make a column that shows rows with a certain keyword..
def keyword_solution(value):
strings = value.split()
if any(word in strings for word in keywords):
return 1
else:
return 0
taleban_2['keyword_solution'] = taleban_2['location'].apply(keyword_solution)
# below will return the 1 values
taleban_2[taleban_2['keyword_solution'].isin(['1'])].head(5)
Just need to replace this logic where all results will be put into column "keyword_solution" that matches either "Afg" or "afg" or "kab" or "Kab" or "kund" or "Kund"

Given the following:
Sentences from the New York Times
Remove all non-alphanumeric characters
Change everything to lowercase, thereby removing the need for different word variations
Split the sentence into a list or set. I used set because of the long sentences.
Add to the keywords list as needed
Matching words from two lists
'afgh' in ['afghanistan']: False
'afgh' in 'afghanistan': True
Therefore, the list comprehension searches for each keyword, in each word of word_list.
[True if word in y else False for y in x for word in keywords]
This allows the list of keywords to be shorter (i.e. given afgh, afghanistan is not required)
import re
import pandas as pd
keywords= ['jalalabad',
'kunduz',
'lashkargah',
'mazar',
'herat',
'mazar',
'afgh',
'kab',
'kand']
df = pd.DataFrame({'sentences': ['The Taliban have wanted the United States to pull troops out of Afghanistan Turkey has wanted the Americans out of northern Syria and North Korea has wanted them to at least stop military exercises with South Korea.',
'President Trump has now to some extent at least obliged all three — but without getting much of anything in return. The self-styled dealmaker has given up the leverage of the United States’ military presence in multiple places around the world without negotiating concessions from those cheering for American forces to leave.',
'For a president who has repeatedly promised to get America out of foreign wars, the decisions reflect a broader conviction that bringing troops home — or at least moving them out of hot spots — is more important than haggling for advantage. In his view, decades of overseas military adventurism has only cost the country enormous blood and treasure, and waiting for deals would prolong a national disaster.',
'The top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin S. Miller, said Monday that the size of the force in the country had dropped by 2,000 over the last year, down to somewhere between 13,000 and 12,000.',
'“The U.S. follows its interests everywhere, and once it doesn’t reach those interests, it leaves the area,” Khairullah Khairkhwa, a senior Taliban negotiator, said in an interview posted on the group’s website recently. “The best example of that is the abandoning of the Kurds in Syria. It’s clear the Kabul administration will face the same fate.”',
'afghan']})
# substitute non-alphanumeric characters
df['sentences'] = df['sentences'].apply(lambda x: re.sub('[\W_]+', ' ', x))
# create a new column with a list of all the words
df['word_list'] = df['sentences'].apply(lambda x: set(x.lower().split()))
# check the list against the keywords
df['location'] = df.word_list.apply(lambda x: any([True if word in y else False for y in x for word in keywords]))
# final
print(df.location)
0 True
1 False
2 False
3 True
4 True
5 True
Name: location, dtype: bool

Use regex to extract unit number

I have a list of descriptions and I want to extract the unit information using regular expression
I watched a video on regex and here's what I got
import re
x = ["Four 10-story towers - five 11-story residential towers around Lake Peterson - two 9-story hotel towers facing Devon Avenue & four levels of retail below the hotels",
"265 rental units",
"10 stories and contain 200 apartments",
"801 residential properties that include row homes, town homes, condos, single-family housing, apartments, and senior rental units",
"4-unit townhouse building (6,528 square feet of living space & 2,755 square feet of unheated garage)"]
unit=[]
for item in x:
extract = re.findall('[0-9]+.unit',item)
unit.append(extract)
print unit
This works with string ends in unit, but I also strings end with 'rental unit','apartment','bed' and other as in this example.
I could do this with multiple regex, but is there a way to do this within one regex?
Thanks!

As long as your not afraid of making a hideously long regex you could use something to the extent of:
compiled_re = re.compile(ur"(\d*)-unit|(\d*)\srental unit|(\d*)\sbed|(\d*)\sappartment")
unit = []
for item in x:
extract = re.findall(compiled_re, item)
unit.append(extract)
You would have to extend the regex pattern with a new "|" followed by a search pattern for each possible type of reference to unit numbers. Unfortunately, if there is very low consistency in the entries this approach would become basically unusable.
Also, might I suggest using a regex tester like Regex101. It really helps determining if your regex will do what you want it to.

Python - RegEx for splitting text into sentences (sentence-tokenizing) [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
How can I split a text into sentences?
(20 answers)
Closed 3 years ago.
I want to make a list of sentences from a string and then print them out. I don't want to use NLTK to do this. So it needs to split on a period at the end of the sentence and not at decimals or abbreviations or title of a name or if the sentence has a .com This is attempt at regex that doesn't work.
import re
text = """\
Mr. Smith bought cheapsite.com for 1.5 million dollars, i.e. he paid a lot for it. Did he mind? Adam Jones Jr. thinks he didn't. In any case, this isn't true... Well, with a probability of .9 it isn't.
"""
sentences = re.split(r' *[\.\?!][\'"\)\]]* *', text)
for stuff in sentences:
print(stuff)
Example output of what it should look like
Mr. Smith bought cheapsite.com for 1.5 million dollars, i.e. he paid a lot for it.
Did he mind?
Adam Jones Jr. thinks he didn't.
In any case, this isn't true...
Well, with a probability of .9 it isn't.

(?<!\w\.\w.)(?<![A-Z][a-z]\.)(?<=\.|\?)\s
Try this. split your string this.You can also check demo.
http://regex101.com/r/nG1gU7/27

Ok so sentence-tokenizers are something I looked at in a little detail, using regexes, nltk, CoreNLP, spaCy. You end up writing your own and it depends on the application. This stuff is tricky and valuable and people don't just give their tokenizer code away. (Ultimately, tokenization is not a deterministic procedure, it's probabilistic, and also depends very heavily on your corpus or domain, e.g. legal/financial documents vs social-media posts vs Yelp reviews vs biomedical papers...)
In general you can't rely on one single Great White infallible regex, you have to write a function which uses several regexes (both positive and negative); also a dictionary of abbreviations, and some basic language parsing which knows that e.g. 'I', 'USA', 'FCC', 'TARP' are capitalized in English.
To illustrate how easily this can get seriously complicated, let's try to write you that functional spec for a deterministic tokenizer just to decide whether single or multiple period ('.'/'...') indicates end-of-sentence, or something else:
function isEndOfSentence(leftContext, rightContext)
Return False for decimals inside numbers or currency e.g. 1.23 , $1.23, "That's just my $.02" Consider also section references like 1.2.A.3.a, European date formats like 09.07.2014, IP addresses like 192.168.1.1, MAC addresses...
Return False (and don't tokenize into individual letters) for known abbreviations e.g. "U.S. stocks are falling" ; this requires a dictionary of known abbreviations. Anything outside that dictionary you will get wrong, unless you add code to detect unknown abbreviations like A.B.C. and add them to a list.
Ellipses '...' at ends of sentences are terminal, but in the middle of sentences are not. This is not as easy as you might think: you need to look at the left context and the right context, specifically is the RHS capitalized and again consider capitalized words like 'I' and abbreviations. Here's an example proving ambiguity which : She asked me to stay... I left an hour later. (Was that one sentence or two? Impossible to determine)
You may also want to write a few patterns to detect and reject miscellaneous non-sentence-ending uses of punctuation: emoticons :-), ASCII art, spaced ellipses . . . and other stuff esp. Twitter. (Making that adaptive is even harder). How do we tell if #midnight is a Twitter user, the show on Comedy Central, text shorthand, or simply unwanted/junk/typo punctuation? Seriously non-trivial.
After you handle all those negative cases, you could arbitrarily say that any isolated period followed by whitespace is likely to be an end of sentence. (Ultimately, if you really want to buy extra accuracy, you end up writing your own probabilistic sentence-tokenizer which uses weights, and training it on a specific corpus(e.g. legal texts, broadcast media, StackOverflow, Twitter, forums comments etc.)) Then you have to manually review exemplars and training errors. See Manning and Jurafsky book or Coursera course [a].
Ultimately you get as much correctness as you are prepared to pay for.
All of the above is clearly specific to the English-language/ abbreviations, US number/time/date formats. If you want to make it country- and language-independent, that's a bigger proposition, you'll need corpora, native-speaking people to label and QA it all, etc.
All of the above is still only ASCII, which is practically speaking only 96 characters. Allow the input to be Unicode, and things get harder still (and the training-set necessarily must be either much bigger or much sparser)
In the simple (deterministic) case, function isEndOfSentence(leftContext, rightContext) would return boolean, but in the more general sense, it's probabilistic: it returns a float 0.0-1.0 (confidence level that that particular '.' is a sentence end).
References: [a] Coursera video: "Basic Text Processing 2-5 - Sentence Segmentation - Stanford NLP - Professor Dan Jurafsky & Chris Manning" [UPDATE: an unofficial version used to be on YouTube, was taken down]

Try to split the input according to the spaces rather than a dot or ?, if you do like this then the dot or ? won't be printed in the final result.
>>> import re
>>> s = """Mr. Smith bought cheapsite.com for 1.5 million dollars, i.e. he paid a lot for it. Did he mind? Adam Jones Jr. thinks he didn't. In any case, this isn't true... Well, with a probability of .9 it isn't."""
>>> m = re.split(r'(?<=[^A-Z].[.?]) +(?=[A-Z])', s)
>>> for i in m:
... print i
...
Mr. Smith bought cheapsite.com for 1.5 million dollars, i.e. he paid a lot for it.
Did he mind?
Adam Jones Jr. thinks he didn't.
In any case, this isn't true...
Well, with a probability of .9 it isn't.

sent = re.split('(?<!\w\.\w.)(?<![A-Z][a-z]\.)(?<=\.|\?)(\s|[A-Z].*)',text)
for s in sent:
print s
Here the regex used is : (?<!\w\.\w.)(?<![A-Z][a-z]\.)(?<=\.|\?)(\s|[A-Z].*)
First block: (?<!\w\.\w.) : this pattern searches in a negative feedback loop (?<!) for all words (\w) followed by fullstop (\.) , followed by other words (\.)
Second block: (?<![A-Z][a-z]\.): this pattern searches in a negative feedback loop for anything starting with uppercase alphabets ([A-Z]), followed by lower case alphabets ([a-z]) till a dot (\.) is found.
Third block: (?<=\.|\?): this pattern searches in a feedback loop of dot (\.) OR question mark (\?)
Fourth block: (\s|[A-Z].*): this pattern searches after the dot OR question mark from the third block. It searches for blank space (\s) OR any sequence of characters starting with a upper case alphabet ([A-Z].*).
This block is important to split if the input is as
Hello world.Hi I am here today.
i.e. if there is space or no space after the dot.

Naive approach for proper english sentences not starting with non-alphas and not containing quoted parts of speech:
import re
text = """\
Mr. Smith bought cheapsite.com for 1.5 million dollars, i.e. he paid a lot for it. Did he mind? Adam Jones Jr. thinks he didn't. In any case, this isn't true... Well, with a probability of .9 it isn't.
"""
EndPunctuation = re.compile(r'([\.\?\!]\s+)')
NonEndings = re.compile(r'(?:Mrs?|Jr|i\.e)\.\s*$')
parts = EndPunctuation.split(text)
sentence = []
for part in parts:
if len(part) and len(sentence) and EndPunctuation.match(sentence[-1]) and not NonEndings.search(''.join(sentence)):
print(''.join(sentence))
sentence = []
if len(part):
sentence.append(part)
if len(sentence):
print(''.join(sentence))
False positive splitting may be reduced by extending NonEndings a bit. Other cases will require additional code. Handling typos in a sensible way will prove difficult with this approach.
You will never reach perfection with this approach. But depending on the task it might just work "enough"...

I'm not great at regular expressions, but a simpler version, "brute force" actually, of above is
sentence = re.compile("([\'\"][A-Z]|([A-Z][a-z]*\. )|[A-Z])(([a-z]*\.[a-z]*\.)|([A-Za-z0-9]*\.[A-Za-z0-9])|([A-Z][a-z]*\. [A-Za-z]*)|[^\.?]|[A-Za-z])*[\.?]")
which means
start acceptable units are '[A-Z] or "[A-Z]
please note, most regular expressions are greedy so the order is very important when we do |(or). That's, why I have written i.e. regular expression first, then is come forms like Inc.

Try this:
(?<!\b(?:[A-Z][a-z]|\d|[i.e]))\.(?!\b(?:com|\d+)\b)

I wrote this taking into consideration smci's comments above. It is a middle-of-the-road approach that doesn't require external libraries and doesn't use regex. It allows you to provide a list of abbreviations and accounts for sentences ended by terminators in wrappers, such as a period and quote: [.", ?', .)].
abbreviations = {'dr.': 'doctor', 'mr.': 'mister', 'bro.': 'brother', 'bro': 'brother', 'mrs.': 'mistress', 'ms.': 'miss', 'jr.': 'junior', 'sr.': 'senior', 'i.e.': 'for example', 'e.g.': 'for example', 'vs.': 'versus'}
terminators = ['.', '!', '?']
wrappers = ['"', "'", ')', ']', '}']
def find_sentences(paragraph):
end = True
sentences = []
while end > -1:
end = find_sentence_end(paragraph)
if end > -1:
sentences.append(paragraph[end:].strip())
paragraph = paragraph[:end]
sentences.append(paragraph)
sentences.reverse()
return sentences
def find_sentence_end(paragraph):
[possible_endings, contraction_locations] = [[], []]
contractions = abbreviations.keys()
sentence_terminators = terminators + [terminator + wrapper for wrapper in wrappers for terminator in terminators]
for sentence_terminator in sentence_terminators:
t_indices = list(find_all(paragraph, sentence_terminator))
possible_endings.extend(([] if not len(t_indices) else [[i, len(sentence_terminator)] for i in t_indices]))
for contraction in contractions:
c_indices = list(find_all(paragraph, contraction))
contraction_locations.extend(([] if not len(c_indices) else [i + len(contraction) for i in c_indices]))
possible_endings = [pe for pe in possible_endings if pe[0] + pe[1] not in contraction_locations]
if len(paragraph) in [pe[0] + pe[1] for pe in possible_endings]:
max_end_start = max([pe[0] for pe in possible_endings])
possible_endings = [pe for pe in possible_endings if pe[0] != max_end_start]
possible_endings = [pe[0] + pe[1] for pe in possible_endings if sum(pe) > len(paragraph) or (sum(pe) < len(paragraph) and paragraph[sum(pe)] == ' ')]
end = (-1 if not len(possible_endings) else max(possible_endings))
return end
def find_all(a_str, sub):
start = 0
while True:
start = a_str.find(sub, start)
if start == -1:
return
yield start
start += len(sub)
I used Karl's find_all function from this entry: Find all occurrences of a substring in Python

My example is based on the example of Ali, adapted to Brazilian Portuguese. Thanks Ali.
ABREVIACOES = ['sra?s?', 'exm[ao]s?', 'ns?', 'nos?', 'doc', 'ac', 'publ', 'ex', 'lv', 'vlr?', 'vls?',
'exmo(a)', 'ilmo(a)', 'av', 'of', 'min', 'livr?', 'co?ls?', 'univ', 'resp', 'cli', 'lb',
'dra?s?', '[a-z]+r\(as?\)', 'ed', 'pa?g', 'cod', 'prof', 'op', 'plan', 'edf?', 'func', 'ch',
'arts?', 'artigs?', 'artg', 'pars?', 'rel', 'tel', 'res', '[a-z]', 'vls?', 'gab', 'bel',
'ilm[oa]', 'parc', 'proc', 'adv', 'vols?', 'cels?', 'pp', 'ex[ao]', 'eg', 'pl', 'ref',
'[0-9]+', 'reg', 'f[ilí]s?', 'inc', 'par', 'alin', 'fts', 'publ?', 'ex', 'v. em', 'v.rev']
ABREVIACOES_RGX = re.compile(r'(?:{})\.\s*$'.format('|\s'.join(ABREVIACOES)), re.IGNORECASE)
def sentencas(texto, min_len=5):
# baseado em https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25735644/python-regex-for-splitting-text-into-sentences-sentence-tokenizing
texto = re.sub(r'\s\s+', ' ', texto)
EndPunctuation = re.compile(r'([\.\?\!]\s+)')
# print(NonEndings)
parts = EndPunctuation.split(texto)
sentencas = []
sentence = []
for part in parts:
txt_sent = ''.join(sentence)
q_len = len(txt_sent)
if len(part) and len(sentence) and q_len >= min_len and \
EndPunctuation.match(sentence[-1]) and \
not ABREVIACOES_RGX.search(txt_sent):
sentencas.append(txt_sent)
sentence = []
if len(part):
sentence.append(part)
if sentence:
sentencas.append(''.join(sentence))
return sentencas
Full code in: https://github.com/luizanisio/comparador_elastic

If you want to break up sentences at 3 periods (not sure if this is what you want) you can use this regular expresion:
import re
text = """\
Mr. Smith bought cheapsite.com for 1.5 million dollars, i.e. he paid a lot for it. Did he mind? Adam Jones Jr. thinks he didn't. In any case, this isn't true... Well, with a probability of .9 it isn't.
"""
sentences = re.split(r'\.{3}', text)
for stuff in sentences:
print(stuff)

Remove nested newline characters in delimited file?

I have a caret-delimited file. The only carets in the file are delimiters -- there are none in text. Several of the fields are free text fields and contain embedded newline characters. This makes parsing the file very difficult. I need the newline characters at the end of the records, but I need to remove them from the fields with text.
This is open source maritime piracy data from the Global Integrated Shipping Information System. Here are three records, preceded by the header row. In the first, the boat name is NORMANNIA, in the second, it is "Unkown" and in the third, it is KOTA BINTANG.
ship_name^ship_flag^tonnage^date^time^imo_num^ship_type^ship_released_on^time_zone^incident_position^coastal_state^area^lat^lon^incident_details^crew_ship_cargo_conseq^incident_location^ship_status_when_attacked^num_involved_in_attack^crew_conseq^weapons_used_by_attackers^ship_parts_raided^lives_lost^crew_wounded^crew_missing^crew_hostage_kidnapped^assaulted^ransom^master_crew_action_taken^reported_to_coastal_authority^reported_to_which_coastal_authority^reporting_state^reporting_intl_org^coastal_state_action_taken
NORMANNIA^Liberia^24987^2009-09-19^22:30^9142980^Bulk carrier^^^Off Pulau Mangkai,^^South China Sea^3° 04.00' N^105° 16.00' E^Eight pirates armed with long knives and crowbars boarded the ship underway. They broke into 2/O cabin, tied up his hands and threatened him with a long knife at his throat. Pirates forced the 2/O to call the Master. While the pirates were waiting next to the Master’s door, they seized C/E and tied up his hands. The pirates rushed inside the Master’s cabin once it was opened. They threatened him with long knives and crowbars and demanded money. Master’s hands were tied up and they forced him to the aft station. The pirates jumped into a long wooden skiff with ship’s cash and crew personal belongings and escaped. C/E and 2/O managed to free themselves and raised the alarm^Pirates tied up the hands of Master, C/E and 2/O. The pirates stole ship’s cash and master’s, C/E & 2/O cash and personal belongings^In international waters^Steaming^5-10 persons^Threat of violence against the crew^Knives^^^^^^^^SSAS activated and reported to owners^^Liberian Authority^^ICC-IMB Piracy Reporting Centre Kuala Lumpur^-
Unkown^Marshall Islands^19846^2013-08-28^23:30^^General cargo ship^^^Cam Pha Port^Viet Nam^South China Sea^20° 59.92' N^107° 19.00' E^While at anchor, six robbers boarded the vessel through the anchor chain and cut opened the padlock of the door to the forecastle store. They removed the turnbuckle and lashing of the forecastle store's rope hatch. The robbers escaped upon hearing the alarm activated when they were sighted by the 2nd officer during the turn-over of duty watch keepers.^"There was no injury to the crew however, the padlock of the door to the forecastle store and the rope hatch were cut-opened.
Two centre shackles and one end shackle were stolen"^In port area^At anchor^5-10 persons^^None/not stated^Main deck^^^^^^^-^^^Viet Nam^"ReCAAP ISC via ReCAAP Focal Point (Vietnam)
ReCAAP ISC via Focal Point (Singapore)"^-
KOTA BINTANG^Singapore^8441^2002-05-12^15:55^8021311^Bulk carrier^^UTC^^^South China Sea^^^Seven robbers armed with long knives boarded the ship, while underway. They broke open accommodation door, held hostage a crew member and forced the Master to open his cabin door. They then tied up the Master and crew member, forced them back onto poop deck from where the robbers jumped overboard and escaped in an unlit boat^Master and cadet assaulted; Cash, crew belongings and ship's cash stolen^In territorial waters^Steaming^5-10 persons^Actual violence against the crew^Knives^^^^^^2^^-^^Yes. SAR, Djakarta and Indonesian Naval Headquarters informed^^ICC-IMB PRC Kuala Lumpur^-
You'll notice that the first and third records are fine and easy to parse. The second record, "Unkown," has some nested newline characters.
How should I go about removing the nested newline characters (but not those at the end of the records) in a python script (or otherwise, if there's an easier way) so that I can import this data into SAS?

load the data into a string a then do
import re
newa=re.sub('\n','',a)
and there will be no newlines in newa
newa=re.sub('\n(?!$)','',a)
and it leaves the ones at the end of the line but strips the rest

I see you've tagged this as regex, but I would recommend using the builtin CSV library to parse this. The CSV library will parse the file correctly, keeping newlines where it should.
Python CSV Examples: http://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html

I solved the problem by counting the number of delimiters encountered and manually switching to a new record when I reached the number associated with a single record. I then stripped all of the newline characters and wrote the data back out to a new file. In essence, it's the original file with the newline characters stripped from the fields but with a newline character at the end of each record. Here's the code:
f = open("events.csv", "r")
carets_per_record = 33
final_file = []
temp_file = []
temp_str = ''
temp_cnt = 0
building = False
for i, line in enumerate(f):
# If there are no carets on the line, we are building a string
if line.count('^') == 0:
building = True
# If we are not building a string, then set temp_str equal to the line
if building is False:
temp_str = line
else:
temp_str = temp_str + " " + line
# Count the number of carets on the line
temp_cnt = temp_str.count('^')
# If we do not have the proper number of carets, then we are building
if temp_cnt < carets_per_record:
building = True
# If we do have the proper number of carets, then we are finished
# and we can push this line to the list
elif temp_cnt == carets_per_record:
building = False
temp_file.append(temp_str)
# Strip embedded newline characters from the temp file
for i, item in enumerate(temp_file):
final_file.append(temp_file[i].replace('\n', ''))
# Write the final_file list out to a csv final_file
g = open("new_events.csv", "wb")
# Write the lines back to the file
for item in enumerate(final_file):
# item is a tuple, so we get the content part and append a new line
g.write(item[1] + '\n')
# Close the files we were working with
f.close()
g.close()

Python parsing

I'm trying to parse the title tag in an RSS 2.0 feed into three different variables for each entry in that feed. Using ElementTree I've already parsed the RSS so that I can print each title [minus the trailing )] with the code below:
feed = getfeed("http://www.tourfilter.com/dallas/rss/by_concert_date")
for item in feed:
print repr(item.title[0:-1])
I include that because, as you can see, the item.title is a repr() data type, which I don't know much about.
A particular repr(item.title[0:-1]) printed in the interactive window looks like this:
'randy travis (Billy Bobs 3/21'
'Michael Schenker Group (House of Blues Dallas 3/26'
The user selects a band and I hope to, after parsing each item.title into 3 variables (one each for band, venue, and date... or possibly an array or I don't know...) select only those related to the band selected. Then they are sent to Google for geocoding, but that's another story.
I've seen some examples of regex and I'm reading about them, but it seems very complicated. Is it? I thought maybe someone here would have some insight as to exactly how to do this in an intelligent way. Should I use the re module? Does it matter that the output is currently is repr()s? Is there a better way? I was thinking I'd use a loop like (and this is my pseudoPython, just kind of notes I'm writing):
list = bandRaw,venue,date,latLong
for item in feed:
parse item.title for bandRaw, venue, date
if bandRaw == str(band)
send venue name + ", Dallas, TX" to google for geocoding
return lat,long
list = list + return character + bandRaw + "," + venue + "," + date + "," + lat + "," + long
else
In the end, I need to have the chosen entries in a .csv (comma-delimited) file looking like this:
band,venue,date,lat,long
randy travis,Billy Bobs,3/21,1234.5678,1234.5678
Michael Schenker Group,House of Blues Dallas,3/26,4321.8765,4321.8765
I hope this isn't too much to ask. I'll be looking into it on my own, just thought I should post here to make sure it got answered.
So, the question is, how do I best parse each repr(item.title[0:-1]) in the feed into the 3 separate values that I can then concatenate into a .csv file?

Don't let regex scare you off... it's well worth learning.
Given the examples above, you might try putting the trailing parenthesis back in, and then using this pattern:
import re
pat = re.compile('([\w\s]+)\(([\w\s]+)(\d+/\d+)\)')
info = pat.match(s)
print info.groups()
('Michael Schenker Group ', 'House of Blues Dallas ', '3/26')
To get at each group individual, just call them on the info object:
print info.group(1) # or info.groups()[0]
print '"%s","%s","%s"' % (info.group(1), info.group(2), info.group(3))
"Michael Schenker Group","House of Blues Dallas","3/26"
The hard thing about regex in this case is making sure you know all the known possible characters in the title. If there are non-alpha chars in the 'Michael Schenker Group' part, you'll have to adjust the regex for that part to allow them.
The pattern above breaks down as follows, which is parsed left to right:
([\w\s]+) : Match any word or space characters (the plus symbol indicates that there should be one or more such characters). The parentheses mean that the match will be captured as a group. This is the "Michael Schenker Group " part. If there can be numbers and dashes here, you'll want to modify the pieces between the square brackets, which are the possible characters for the set.
\( : A literal parenthesis. The backslash escapes the parenthesis, since otherwise it counts as a regex command. This is the "(" part of the string.
([\w\s]+) : Same as the one above, but this time matches the "House of Blues Dallas " part. In parentheses so they will be captured as the second group.
(\d+/\d+) : Matches the digits 3 and 26 with a slash in the middle. In parentheses so they will be captured as the third group.
\) : Closing parenthesis for the above.
The python intro to regex is quite good, and you might want to spend an evening going over it http://docs.python.org/library/re.html#module-re. Also, check Dive Into Python, which has a friendly introduction: http://diveintopython3.ep.io/regular-expressions.html.
EDIT: See zacherates below, who has some nice edits. Two heads are better than one!

Regular expressions are a great solution to this problem:
>>> import re
>>> s = 'Michael Schenker Group (House of Blues Dallas 3/26'
>>> re.match(r'(.*) \((.*) (\d+/\d+)', s).groups()
('Michael Schenker Group', 'House of Blues Dallas', '3/26')
As a side note, you might want to look at the Universal Feed Parser for handling the RSS parsing as feeds have a bad habit of being malformed.
Edit
In regards to your comment... The strings occasionally being wrapped in "s rather than 's has to do with the fact that you're using repr. The repr of a string is usually delimited with 's, unless that string contains one or more 's, where instead it uses "s so that the 's don't have to be escaped:
>>> "Hello there"
'Hello there'
>>> "it's not its"
"it's not its"
Notice the different quote styles.

Regarding the repr(item.title[0:-1]) part, not sure where you got that from but I'm pretty sure you can simply use item.title. All you're doing is removing the last char from the string and then calling repr() on it, which does nothing.
Your code should look something like this:
import geocoders # from GeoPy
us = geocoders.GeocoderDotUS()
import feedparser # from www.feedparser.org
feedurl = "http://www.tourfilter.com/dallas/rss/by_concert_date"
feed = feedparser.parse(feedurl)
lines = []
for entry in feed.entries:
m = re.search(r'(.*) \((.*) (\d+/\d+)\)', entry.title)
if m:
bandRaw, venue, date = m.groups()
if band == bandRaw:
place, (lat, lng) = us.geocode(venue + ", Dallas, TX")
lines.append(",".join([band, venue, date, lat, lng]))
result = "\n".join(lines)
EDIT: replaced list with lines as the var name. list is a builtin and should not be used as a variable name. Sorry.