Question

I am trying to search through a load of text(located in the variable whole) for the word “he” this is then to be replaced by “she”
I then want to search through the text again and replace “she” with he.
however the regular exprssions below are overiding each other – meaning in this example the text will be all “he”

My question – is there anyway of combining the regular expressions and doing both operations in one go?

#jackNew.heShe() == she
#jillNew.heShe() == he  

whole=re.sub(r'(?i)\bhe\b', jackNew.heShe(), whole)

whole=re.sub(r'(?i)\bshe\b', jillNew.heShe(), whole)

many thanks for your help.

Answer 1

You can make use of the fact that in re.sub(pattern, repl, string, count=0, flags=0)

If repl is a function, it is called for every non-overlapping occurrence of pattern. The function takes a single match object argument, and returns the replacement string.

import re
s = 'she said he was a nice girl'
re.sub('s?he', lambda m: 'he' if m.group() == 'she' else 'she', s)

gives

'he said she was a nice girl'