Question

I have files with the words written on different speaking languages. I would like to parse them using python programming language to have the same structure in all files.
Currently files contain the lines like

1. word1
24. word2
- word3
word4
** word5

The goal is to have all of them written like

** word

I have already some code reading from one file, fr, and writing to new one, fw, like this

    for line in fr:
        match = re.search(r'^\*\* .*', line)
        if match:
        fw.write(line)

I have two questions.

First question. How to write regexp, so it will be searching for line starting not from alpha character and remove everything that is before alpha character?

I have tried like this

fw.write(re.sub(r'(^([^a-zA-Z].*)([a-zA-Z])*.*)', "** \1", line))

but it doesn’t work.

Second question. How to verify if the string starts with alpha character. I have tried

print line[0].isalpha()

it returns ?. Do I need to have it unicode first?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Try matching any of the possible line prefixes, then collect the rest of the line as your word of interest.

pat = re.compile(r'^(\d+\. |- |\*\* )?(?P<word>.*)')

The first group defines the possible prefixes (you might want to fix it up for one or more spaces instead of a literal space). The second, named, group gets the word.