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How to find required word in novel in python?

I have a text and I have got a task in python with reading module:
Find the names of people who are referred to as Mr. XXX. Save the result in a dictionary with the name as key and number of times it is used as value. For example:
If Mr. Churchill is in the novel, then include {'Churchill' : 2}
If Mr. Frank Churchill is in the novel, then include {'Frank Churchill' : 4}
The file is .txt and it contains around 10-15 paragraphs.
Do you have ideas about how can it be improved? (It gives me error after some words, I guess error happens due to the reason that one of the Mr. is at the end of the line.)
orig_text= open('emma.txt', encoding = 'UTF-8')
lines= orig_text.readlines()[32:16267]
counts = dict()
for line in lines:
wordsdirty = line.split()
try:
print (wordsdirty[wordsdirty.index('Mr.') + 1])
except ValueError:
continue

Try this:
text = "When did Mr. Churchill told Mr. James Brown about the fish"
m = [x[0] for x in re.findall('(Mr\.( [A-Z][a-z]*)+)', text)]
You get:
['Mr. Churchill', 'Mr. James Brown']
To solve the line issue simply read the entire file:
text = file.read()
Then, to count the occurrences, simply run:
Counter(m)
Finally, if you'd like to drop 'Mr. ' from all your dictionary entries, use x[0][4:] instead of x[0].

This can be easily done using regex and capturing group.
Take a look here for reference, in this scenario you might want to do something like
# retrieve a list of strings that match your regex
matches = re.findall("Mr\. ([a-zA-Z]+)", your_entire_file) # not sure about the regex
# then create a dictionary and count the occurrences of each match
# if you are allowed to use modules, this can be done using Counter
Counter(matches)
To access the entire file like that, you might want to map it to memory, take a look at this question

filtering the tag set and make the sequence of bigram

I'm sorry to ask question with same text file.
below is my working text file string.
The/at Fulton/np-tl County/nn-tl Grand/jj-tl Jury/nn-tl said/vbd Friday/nr an/at investigation/nn of/in Atlanta's/np$ recent/jj primary/nn election/nn produced/vbd
This string consists of the "word / its tag" format, as you can see. From this string, I want to filter only the sequence of "noun + adjective" and make them to the bigram. For example, "Grand/jj-tl Jury/nn-tl" is exact word sequence that I want. (nn means noun, jj means adjective and adjuncts such as "-tl" are additional information about the tag.)
Maybe this will be easy job. And I first used regex for filtering. Below is my code.
import re
f = open(textfile)
raw = f.read()
tag_list = re.findall("\w+/jj-?\w* \w+/nn-?\w*", raw)
print tag_list
This codes give me the exact words list. However, what I want is the bigram data. That code only gives me the list of words, such like this.
['Grand/jj-tl Jury/nn-tl', 'recent/jj primary/nn', 'Executive/jj-tl Committee/nn-tl']
I want this data to be converted such as below.
[('Grand/jj-tl, Jury/nn-tl'), ('recent/jj ,primary/nn'), ('Executive/jj-tl , Committee/nn-tl')]
i.e. the list of bigram data. I need your advice.

I think once you have found the tag_list it should be an easy job afterwards just using the list comprehension:
>>> tag_list = ['Grand/jj-tl Jury/nn-tl', 'recent/jj primary/nn', 'Executive/jj-tl Committee/nn-tl']
>>> [tag.replace(' ', ', ') for tag in tag_list]
['Grand/jj-tl, Jury/nn-tl', 'recent/jj, primary/nn', 'Executive/jj-tl, Committee/nn-tl']
In your original demonstration, I am not sure why do you have ('Grand/jj-tl, Jury/nn-tl') and I am also not sure why would you like to join these bigrams using comma.
I think it would be better to have a list of list where the inner list have the bigram data:
>>> [tag.split() for tag in tag_list]
[['Grand/jj-tl', 'Jury/nn-tl'], ['recent/jj', 'primary/nn'], ['Executive/jj-tl', 'Committee/nn-tl']]

Using regular expressions in python to extract location mentions in a sentence

I am writing a code using python to extract the name of a road,street, highway, for example a sentence like "There is an accident along Uhuru Highway", I want my code to be able to extract the name of the highway mentioned, I have written the code below.
sentence="there is an accident along uhuru highway"
listw=[word for word in sentence.lower().split()]
for i in range(len(listw)):
if listw[i] == "highway":
print listw[i-1] + " "+ listw[i]
I can achieve this but my code is not optimized, i am thinking of using regular expressions, any help please

'uhuru highway' can be found as follows
import re
m = re.search(r'\S+ highway', sentence) # non-white-space followed by ' highway'
print(m.group())
# 'uhuru highway'

If the location you want to extract will always have highway after it, you can use:
>>> sentence = "there is an accident along uhuru highway"
>>> a = re.search(r'.* ([\w\s\d\-\_]+) highway', sentence)
>>> print(a.group(1))
>>> uhuru

You can do the following without using regexes:
sentence.split("highway")[0].strip().split(' ')[-1]
First split according to "highway". You'll get:
['there is an accident along uhuru', '']
And now you can easily extract the last word from the first part.

What is a good strategy to group similar words?

Say I have a list of movie names with misspellings and small variations like this -
"Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl"
"Pirates of the carribean"
"Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest"
"Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy"
"Pirates of the Caribbean"
"Pirates Of The Carribean"
How do I group or find such sets of words, preferably using python and/or redis?

Have a look at "fuzzy matching". Some great tools in the thread below that calculates similarities between strings.
I'm especially fond of the difflib module
>>> get_close_matches('appel', ['ape', 'apple', 'peach', 'puppy'])
['apple', 'ape']
>>> import keyword
>>> get_close_matches('wheel', keyword.kwlist)
['while']
>>> get_close_matches('apple', keyword.kwlist)
[]
>>> get_close_matches('accept', keyword.kwlist)
['except']
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/682367/good-python-modules-for-fuzzy-string-comparison

You might notice that similar strings have large common substring, for example:
"Bla bla bLa" and "Bla bla bRa" => common substring is "Bla bla ba" (notice the third word)
To find common substring you may use dynamic programming algorithm. One of algorithms variations is Levenshtein distance (distance between most similar strings is very small, and between more different strings distance is bigger) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance.
Also for quick performance you may try to adapt Soundex algorithm - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex.
So after calculating distance between all your strings, you have to clusterize them. The most simple way is k-means (but it needs you to define number of clusters). If you actually don't know number of clusters, you have to use hierarchical clustering. Note that number of clusters in your situation is number of different movies titles + 1(for totally bad spelled strings).

I believe there is in fact two distinct problems.
The first is spell correction. You can have one in Python here
http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
The second is more functional. Here is what I'd do after the spell correction. I would make a relation function.
related( sentence1, sentence2 ) if and only if sentence1 and sentence2 have rare common words. By rare, I mean words different than (The, what, is, etc...). You can take a look at the TF/IDF system to determine if two document are related using their words. Just googling a bit I found this:
https://code.google.com/p/tfidf/

To add another tip to Fredrik's answer, you could also get inspired from search engines like code, such as this one :
def dosearch(terms, searchtype, case, adddir, files = []):
found = []
if files != None:
titlesrch = re.compile('>title<.*>/title<')
for file in files:
title = ""
if not (file.lower().endswith("html") or file.lower().endswith("htm")):
continue
filecontents = open(BASE_DIR + adddir + file, 'r').read()
titletmp = titlesrch.search(filecontents)
if titletmp != None:
title = filecontents.strip()[titletmp.start() + 7:titletmp.end() - 8]
filecontents = remove_tags(filecontents)
filecontents = filecontents.lstrip()
filecontents = filecontents.rstrip()
if dofind(filecontents, case, searchtype, terms) > 0:
found.append(title)
found.append(file)
return found
Source and more information: http://www.zackgrossbart.com/hackito/search-engine-python/
Regards,
Max

One approach would be to pre-process all the strings before you compare them: convert all to lowercase, standardize whitespace (eg, replace any whitespace with single spaces). If punctuation is not important to your end goal, you can remove all punctuation characters as well.
Levenshtein distance is commonly-used to determine similarity of a string, this should help you group strings which differ by small spelling errors.

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.