Question

I have a large text file with words that are interspersed with numbers and two types of characters, a '|' and '.'. I searched on StackOverflow and found how to take this string and only retain letters. For example, if

old_fruits='apple|0.00|kiwi|0.00|0.5369|-0.2437|banana|0.00|pear'

then

re.sub("[^A-Za-z]","",old_fruits)

would return

'applekiwibananapear'

I’m trying to write these words out to a file with one word on each line, followed by a newline and then the next word, like:

apple
kiwi
banana
pear

Any thoughts or pointing in the right direction is appreciated.

Answer 1

Try this:

import re

old_fruits = 'apple|0.00|kiwi|0.00|0.5369|-0.2437|banana|0.00|pear'

with open('fruits.out', 'w') as f:
    fruits = re.findall(r'[^\W\d]+', old_fruits)
    f.write('\n'.join(fruits))