Delete a string if matching with a list

Question

I want to recognize if the words from a list are in an input string, and if so remove that word.

I have tried:

words = ["youtube","search youtube","play music"]
Inp = "search youtube Rockstar"

if words in Inp:
   Inp = Inp.replace(words,"")

And the wanted output is:

Inp = "Rockstar"

Question has nothing to do with `artificial-intelligence`, kindly do not spam irrelevant tags (removed). — desertnaut, Sep 21 '21 at 10:39

Barmar · Answer 1 · 2021-09-17T22:56:58.140

0

You have to loop through the words list and replace each word.

for word in words:
    Inp = Inp.replace(word, '')

If there's overlap between the elements of words, such as youtube and search youtube, you need to put the longer one first. Otherwise, when youtube is removed, it won't find search youtube to replace it. So make it:

words = ["search youtube","youtube","play music"]

If you can't change words like this, you can sort them when looping:

for word in sorted(words, key=len, reverse=True):

edited Sep 17 '21 at 22:56

answered Sep 17 '21 at 21:31

Barmar

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That won't work with the example in the question. It will replace "youtube", not "search youtube". – khelwood Sep 17 '21 at 21:45
@khelwood Thanks, I've updated the answer to show how to fix the `words` list. – Barmar Sep 17 '21 at 22:57
Your solution will fail for `case sensitive` strings. :) – Sabil Sep 17 '21 at 23:27
@Sabil True, but there's no indication that case-insensitiviity is required. If that's needed, see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/919056/case-insensitive-replace – Barmar Sep 17 '21 at 23:41

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 17 '21 at 21:41

0

Use a for loop as so:

words = ["youtube","search youtube","play music"]
Inp = "search youtube Rockstar"

for word in words:
  if word in Inp:
    Inp = inp.replace(word, '')
  else:
    pass

print(Inp)

answered Sep 17 '21 at 21:41

Peter Nielsen

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score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 17 '21 at 23:26

It's a bit complected to remove space separated strings from a string. You have to do some hacks to achive this.

Steps:

Firstly you have to generate an unique list of words that you want to remove
Remove filtered words from the string
Create a new list of words from previously generated string
Finally join the list to remove unnecessary spaces

Code:

import re


def remove_matching_string(my_string, words):
    # generate an unique list of words that we want to remove
    removal_list = list(set(sum([word.split() for word in words], [])))

    # remove strings from removal list
    for word in removal_list:
        insensitive_str = re.compile(re.escape(word), re.IGNORECASE)
        my_string = insensitive_str.sub('', my_string)

    # split string after apply removal list
    my_string = my_string.split()

    # concat string to remove unnecessary space between words
    final_string = ' '.join(s for s in my_string if s)

    # return the final string
    return final_string


words = ["youtube","search youtube","play music"]
Inp = "Search youtube Rockstar Play Music On Youtube   PlAy MusIc Now"

final_string = remove_matching_string(Inp, words)
print(final_string)

Output:

Rockstar On Now

Delete a string if matching with a list

3 Answers3