On Jul 31, 9:07 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I am using regular expressions to search a string (always full
> sentences, maybe more than one sentence) for common abbreviations and
> remove the periods. I need to break the string into different
> sentences but split('.') doesn't solve the whole problem because of
> possible periods in the middle of a sentence.
>
> So I have...
>
> ----------------
>
> import re
>
> middle_abbr = re.compile('[A-Za-z0-9]\.[A-Za-z0-9]\.')
>
> # this will find abbreviations like e.g. or i.e. in the middle of a
> sentence.
> # then I want to remove the periods.
>
> ----------------
>
> I want to keep the ie or eg but just take out the periods. Any
> ideas? Of course newString = middle_abbr.sub('',txt) where txt is the
> string will take out the entire abbreviation with the alphanumeric
> characters included.
It's recommended that you should use a raw strings for regular
expressions.
Capture the letters using parentheses:
middle_abbr = re.compile(r'([A-Za-z0-9])\.([A-Za-z0-9])\.')
and replace what was found with what was captured:
newString = middle_abbr.sub(r'\1\2', txt)
HTH
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