Question

How do I parse sentence case phrases from a passage.

For example from this passage

Conan Doyle said that the character of Holmes was inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell, for whom Doyle had worked as a clerk at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Like Holmes, Bell was noted for drawing large conclusions from the smallest observations.[1] Michael Harrison argued in a 1971 article in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine that the character was inspired by Wendell Scherer, a “consulting detective” in a murder case that allegedly received a great deal of newspaper attention in England in 1882.

We need to generate stuff like Conan Doyle, Holmes, Dr Joseph Bell, Wendell Scherr etc.

I would prefer a Pythonic Solution if possible

Answer 1

This kind of processing can be very tricky. This simple code does almost the right thing:

for s in re.finditer(r"([A-Z][a-z]+[. ]+)+([A-Z][a-z]+)?", text):
    print s.group(0)

produces:

Conan Doyle
Holmes
Dr. Joseph Bell
Doyle
Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Like Holmes
Bell
Michael Harrison
Ellery Queen
Mystery Magazine
Wendell Scherer
England

To include “Dr. Joseph Bell”, you need to be ok with the period in the string, which allows in “Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Like Holmes”.

I had a similar problem: Separating Sentences.