Question

Hey I have written a very simple parser with pyparsing which detects some tokens in a text and then replaces them with a different string. The problem is that right now my code only works with exact matches. What I’d like to do is detect partial matches too. For example if the token is “foobar” I’d like to match a word like “foobarfoo”. Is there a way to do that with pyparsing? I have looked at the examples and did some research but I came up with nothing.

Thanks

EDIT:

I have a list of tokens to match and a list of words in the text. So I want a solution which takes into account this fact. The list of tokens can be quite big.

Answer 1

Literal('foobar')+Word(pyp.alphas) defines a pyparsing ParseExpression which requires the text to startwith 'foobar' followed by any alphacharacter. For example:

import pyparsing as pyp
ident = pyp.Combine(pyp.Literal('foobar')+pyp.Word(pyp.alphas))('foo')
for match in ident.searchString('bar foobarfoo bar foobarbafoo'):
    print(match.foo)

yields

foobarfoo
foobarbafoo