Finding the position of words in a string

Question

My Task

I am trying to find the position of words appearing in a string using regex

Code

import re

# A random string

mystr = "there not what is jake can do for you ask what you play do for spare jake".upper() 

match = re.search(r"[^a-zA-Z](jake)[^a-zA-Z]", mystr)

print match.start(1)

Output

Expected output

I would expect my output to contain the positions of the string jake:

5, 17

EDIT: To clarify, I'm trying to identify the position of words. I believe what I have done is found the index and am unsure how to make it work as I expect

@RomanPerekhrest: it is a rhetorical question. Wiktor wants to point out the wrong approach. The string is made out of characters, not of words. The OP is getting the index of the first character occurence. — cezar, May 22 '17 at 09:26
`r'[\s]*(jake)[\s]*'` would already be a better Regex, but I don't think this is possible with Regex only — Ludisposed, May 22 '17 at 09:33
Please ref [Find the indexes of all regex matches in Python?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3519565/find-the-indexes-of-all-regex-matches-in-python) — Fogmoon, May 22 '17 at 09:40

RomanPerekhrest · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-22T09:35:31.083

9

To get the "ordinal" positions of search string jake in the input string use the following approach:

mystr = "there not what is jake can do for you ask what you play do for spare jake"
search_str = 'jake'

result = [i+1 for i,w in enumerate(mystr.split()) if w.lower() == search_str]
print(result)

The output:

[5, 17]

enumerate(mystr.split()) - to get enumerated object (pairs of items with their positions/indices)
w.lower() == search_str - if a word is equal to search string

edited May 22 '17 at 09:35

answered May 22 '17 at 09:31

RomanPerekhrest

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I was writting pretty much the same, but you were faster. Easy and simple solution without using RegEx. – cezar May 22 '17 at 09:32
He asked using regex, right? – bharadhwaj May 22 '17 at 09:38
@cezar, yes, no need regex in this case and import re – RomanPerekhrest May 22 '17 at 09:38

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered May 22 '17 at 09:31

4

Try this way:

mystr = "there not what is jake can do for you ask what you play do for spare jake"
result = [index+1 for index,word in enumerate(mystr.split()) if word=='jake']
result

Output:

[5, 17]

answered May 22 '17 at 09:31

Tiny.D

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you were 12 seconds later – RomanPerekhrest May 22 '17 at 09:31
And I was even more late than that, so discarded my answer. But you know that it takes much more than 12 seconds to write an answer. Speed is good, but accuracy is more important. – cezar May 22 '17 at 09:33
@RomanPerekhrest we are in same time space :) – Tiny.D May 22 '17 at 09:34

Finding the position of words in a string

2 Answers2