Question

Can someone help me clean up this nested regex (re.sub) in python, please? I know there must be a better way to do this but I can’t figure how.

re.sub('.*Chairman.*','Executive Director',re.sub('.*Managing Director.*','Executive Director',row['capacity']))

I have a column of strings (row[‘capacity’]) that I’ve pulled from a database as part of a set and I want to iterate through it, replacing any lines that contain ‘chairman’ or ‘managing director’ with ‘Executive director’ when I write it to the set.

here’s the full line of code:

wrhkset = set (( row['organization'], row['lastname'], row['givenname'], re.sub('.*Chairman.*','Executive Director',re.sub('.*Managing Director.*','Executive Director',row['capacity'])) ) for row in wrhk)

NOTE: ‘wrhk’ is a tuple of lists. I can include more of the code if necessary, but I’m really just hoping for a more streamlined way to tackle the nested re.sub statements I have.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You could use a | to join two regexs with “or”:

re.sub(r'''(?x)
     .*(
     Chairman | Managing[]Director     # or
     ).*     
     ''','Executive Director', row['capacity'])