Remove expressions from string if they are present

Question

I have a problem. I have a string like this: "Can you please turn off the lights?". Now I want to split the sentence like this:

['can', 'you', 'please', 'turn', 'off', 'the', 'lights?']

But now I also want to remove the ? at the end. I know I could just use substr but the expressions are not always available. How can I detecet them and if they are present remove them from a sentence?

Here is my code now:

given_command = "Can you please turn off the lights?"

data = given_command.lower().split(" ")
print(data)

It may be like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46016687/python-regular-expression-to-split-string-and-get-all-words-is-not-working — Alireza HI, Aug 11 '19 at 21:36

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 11 '19 at 21:36

0

Try replace

In [98]: given_command = "Can you please turn off the lights?"
    ...:
    ...: data = given_command.lower().replace('?','').split(" ")
    ...:
    ...: print(data)
['can', 'you', 'please', 'turn', 'off', 'the', 'lights']

answered Aug 11 '19 at 21:36

MichaelD

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 11 '19 at 21:36

If you have just one symbol to remove (?), use str.replace:

...
>>> data = given_command.lower().replace('?', '').split(' ')
>>> print(data)
['can', 'you', 'please', 'turn', 'off', 'the', 'lights']

If you have more symbols, use re.sub (I'm using symbols ?, !, , and . as an example):

...
>>> import re
>>> data = re.sub(r'[?!,.]', '', given_command.lower()).split(' ')
>>> print(data)
['can', 'you', 'please', 'turn', 'off', 'the', 'lights']

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 11 '19 at 21:38

As I referenced a link in comments you can see this one: enter link description here

It will split any mark for you:

import re
pattern = r"\w+(?:\.?\w+)*"
re.findall(pattern, 'hello, to world or not?', re.A)

result:

['hello', 'to', 'world', 'or', 'not']

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 11 '19 at 21:39

You can use re (regex) module:

import re
given_command = r"Can you please turn off the lights?"
data = given_command.lower().split(" ")
print(list(map(lambda x: re.sub('\\W', '', x), data))) # replace any non alphanumeric character with the empty string

Output:

['can', 'you', 'please', 'turn', 'off', 'the', 'lights']

Remove expressions from string if they are present

4 Answers4