Replace Acronyms with their values Python

Question

I'm working on cleaning some text that contains a lot of acronyms. So I have made a dictionary of a few examples and along with their values, however i am running into a few problems with it. Example code below

    def acr(text):
         acr_dict = {'ft': 'feet'
                      'mi': michigan }
            

         for word, abr in acr_dict.items():
                 text = text.replace(word.lower(), abr)
                 return text

The logic works, but if I have an instance where the letters of the acronym could also be found in certain other words, it will do the following

ex: print(acr('I like milk and live in mi))

output --> I like michiganlk and live in michigan

Any advice on how to not have it look for the acronym letters within other words?

Does this question and its answers help you? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15863066/python-regular-expression-match-whole-word — user1717828, Mar 19 '21 at 18:00

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 19 '21 at 18:43

The simplest solution is, as others have stated, to use regexes.

import re

ACR_DICT = {'ft': 'feet', 'mi': 'michigan'}

def acr(text):
    for k, v in ACR_DICT.items():
        text = re.sub(rf'\b{k}\b', v, text)
    return text


acr('I might be 6 ft tall. I often left my home state of mi at 3 years old.')
# 'I might be 6 feet tall. I often left my home state of michigan at 3 years old.'

Note the usage of the word-boundary metacharacter '\b'. This will ensure that the regex doesn't find matches inside words like 'often' or 'might'.

ah ok yeah this looks like it would be a good approach thank you! — Jim, Mar 19 '21 at 19:16

jacob · Answer 2 · 2021-03-19T19:16:35.943

One potential solution (assuming you have trivial white space) could be to split the string into words, and compare each one and replace if it matches.

example = "my name is michael and i was born in mi and am 6 ft"

def acr(text):
    acr_dict = {
        'ft': 'feet',
        'mi': 'michigan'
    }

    text_words = text.split()
    for i, word in enumerate(text_words):
        if word.lower() in acr_dict:
            text_words[i] = acr_dict[word]
    return ' '.join(text_words)

print(acr(example))
# my name is michael and i was born in michigan and am 6 feet

And if you did have non-trivial white space and were okay using regular expressions, you could do this which should preserve the specific white space character,

import re

def acr(text):
    acr_dict = {
        'ft': 'feet',
        'mi': 'michigan'
    }

    for k, v in acr_dict.items():
        text = re.sub(rf"(\s){k.lower()}(\s|\Z)", rf"\1{v}\2", text)

    return text

If you were worried about performance, you could try compiling each regex for your acronym list before hand.

Replace Acronyms with their values Python

2 Answers2

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