Question

I am very new to python and
I want to match a pattern which comes from a list and if matches return the pattern.
List contains names of areas in a city and I need to find if a area is present in a url like

www.abc.com/category-city_area_name-deal/

city=[AreaName]

I need to match AreaName in the url regardless of underscore present in url. So for me when i search for AreaName in the url, it should match to area_name.

Answer 1

If you want to ignore underscores and upper/lower case, you can try this without using regex:

url = "www.abc.com/category-city_area_name-deal/"
city = "AreaName"

if city.replace('_', '').lower() in url.replace('_', '').lower():
    print 'ok'

The a.replace('_', '').lower() removes all underscores from a and converts it to lowercase.

 city.replace('_', '').lower() -> 'areaname'
 url.replace('_', '').lower()  -> 'www.abc.com/category-cityareaname-deal/'

and then it tests whether 'areaname' is contained within 'www.abc.com/category-cityareaname-deal/', which is True.