Question

I am fetching some information from the sites and for example i am fetching address of some customers

address = ['Mr Thomas',
 '+(91)-9849633132, 9959455935',
 '+(91)-9849633132',
 '9196358485',
 '8846853128',
 '8-4-236/2']

From the above list i want to ignore strings starting with +(91) and 9 and 8 which are nothing but the phone numbers, so i used regular expressions as below

import re


result = [i for i in address if not re.match(r"[98]\B", i)]

result

['Mr Thomas','+(91)-9849633132, 9959455935','+(91)-9849633132','8-4-236/2']

That is the strings starting with 9 and 8 are ignored but i want to ignore the strings starting with +(91) too , can anyone please let me know how to do this.

Answer 1

Just add in another check for the +(91), using the | (or) operator. Like so:

>>> [i for i in address if not re.match(r"[98]\B|\+\(91\)\B", i)]
['Mr Thomas', '8-4-236/2']

Note that you have to escape +, (, and ) because those are special characters.

As an aside, it might be more efficient to use a filter, rather than a list comprehension:

>>> filter(lambda x: not re.match(r"[98]\B|\+\(91\)\B", x), address)
['Mr Thomas', '8-4-236/2']

Though I can’t be sure.

Edit: Looks like it’s not more efficient. However, I find it to be more self documenting, but you can take it as you will.