Regex to exactly match series of words or phrases

Asked May 12 '22 at 17:13

Active May 12 '22 at 17:16

Viewed 21 times

I'm using python and I want to strip some words/phrases appearing before a person's name. There's my regex, but it's doing partial matching instead of matching the exact words/phrases.

a = 'THE REVOF Joe Johnson'
pattern_prefix = r"^([MR]|[MRS]|[MISS]|[DR]|[PROF]|[EST OF]|[THE REV]|[ES OF]|[THE ESTASTE OF]|[ESTATE OF]|[THE ESTTE OF])+\s"
re.sub(pattern_prefix, ' ', a.strip(), flags=re.IGNORECASE)```

Example of input and desired output:
Mr Joe Johnson -- > Joe Johnson
EST OF Martha Jar -- > Martha Jar
THE REVOF Joe John --> REVOF Joe John; but my code is recently returning Joe John

I tried using word/phrase boundary (i.e., \b($word)\b, but I did not get the desired output.

edited May 12 '22 at 17:14

asked May 12 '22 at 17:13

Kweweli

2

remove the square brackets – Marat May 12 '22 at 17:16
1

Do not abuse character classes, see https://ideone.com/Ge9WG7. `[...]` matches a single char from the set. – Wiktor Stribiżew May 12 '22 at 17:16
Thanks @Marat and wiktor Stribizew. This (pattern_prefix = r"^(MR|MRS|MISS|DR|PROF|EST OF|THE REV|ES OF|THE ESTASTE OF|ESTATE OF|THE ESTTE OF)\s") now works as desired. – Kweweli May 12 '22 at 17:29

Regex to exactly match series of words or phrases

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