CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonregex
Ogre
Ogre

Reputation: 167

Remove all occurrences of words in a string from a python list

I'm trying to match and remove all words in a list from a string using a compiled regex but I'm struggling to avoid occurrences within words.

Current:

 REMOVE_LIST = ["a", "an", "as", "at", ...]

 remove = '|'.join(REMOVE_LIST)
 regex = re.compile(r'('+remove+')', flags=re.IGNORECASE)
 out = regex.sub("", text)

In: "The quick brown fox jumped over an ant"

Out: "quick brown fox jumped over t"

Expected: "quick brown fox jumped over"

I've tried changing the string to compile to the following but to no avail:

 regex = re.compile(r'\b('+remove+')\b', flags=re.IGNORECASE)

Any suggestions or am I missing something garishly obvious?

Upvotes: 9

Views: 26278

Answers (2)

jurgenreza
jurgenreza

Reputation: 6086

here is a suggestion without using regex you may want to consider:

>>> sentence = 'word1 word2 word3 word1 word2 word4'
>>> remove_list = ['word1', 'word2']
>>> word_list = sentence.split()
>>> ' '.join([i for i in word_list if i not in remove_list])
'word3 word4'

Upvotes: 19

NPE
NPE

Reputation: 500297

One problem is that only the first \b is inside a raw string. The second gets interpreted as the backspace character (ASCII 8) rather than as a word boundary.

To fix, change

regex = re.compile(r'\b('+remove+')\b', flags=re.IGNORECASE)

to

regex = re.compile(r'\b('+remove+r')\b', flags=re.IGNORECASE)
                                 ^ THIS

Upvotes: 14

Related Questions