Question

Example:

names = ['James John', 'Robert David', 'Paul' ... the list has 5K items]

text1 = 'I saw James today'
text2 = 'I saw James John today'
text3 = 'I met Paul'

is_name_in_text(text1,names)   # this returns false 'James' in not in list
is_name_in_text(text2,names)   # this returns 'James John'
is_name_in_text(text3,names)   # this return 'Paul'

is_name_in_text() searches if any of the name list is in text.

The easy way to do is to just check if the name is in the list by using in operator, but the list has 5,000 items, so it is not efficient. I can just split the text into words and check if the words are in the list, but this not going to work if you have more than one word matching. Line number 7 will fail in this case.

Answer 1

Make names into a set and use the in-operator for fast O(1) lookup.

You can use a regex to parse out the possible names in a sentence:

>>> import re
>>> findnames = re.compile(r'([A-Z]\w*(?:\s[A-Z]\w*)?)')
>>> def is_name_in_text(text, names):
        for possible_name in set(findnames.findall(text)):
            if possible_name in names:
                return possible_name
        return False

>>> names = set(['James John', 'Robert David', 'Paul'])
>>> is_name_in_text('I saw James today', names)
False
>>> is_name_in_text('I saw James John today', names)
'James John'
>>> is_name_in_text('I met Paul', names)
'Paul'