Question

I need a regex in Python that will remove the last word from a string if it contains a certain character, in this case ‘#’, and in other appearances of that character ‘#’, only the character is removed, not the word.

So the string:

What a #great day #happy

would become:

What a great day

so far I have tried

    entry = re.sub('(?<=#)\w+','',entry) 

but this removes all words containing ‘#’.

Answer 1

import re

print(re.sub(r'''(?x)    # VERBOSE mode
                 [#]     # literal #
                 |       # or
                 \s*     # zero-or-more spaces
                 \w*     # zero-or-more alphanumeric characters 
                 [#]     # literal #
                 \w*     # zero-or-more alphanumeric characters 
                 $       # end of line
                 ''',
             '', # substitute matched text with an empty string
             'What a #great day #happy'))

yields

What a great day