Question

i want to split a sentence to convert the words into tags (to make a simple full text search in Mongodb), and i dont want to save comma or colon :

phrase = "hello, this is a simple description!"
pattern  = "[\"\'\!\?\:\,\;]"

i’ve tried this:

re.split(pattern, phrase)
Out[1]: ['hello', ' this is a simple description', ''] # as you can see, i've always blank characters.

i want to remove all “non letters characters”, there is phrase.replace(",", " ") but replaces only one character, so how do i use the regular expression with replace? sssomething like re.remove(pattern, phrase), is there is a loop, does this become a heavy work to the server?

Answer 1

non-regex solution:
use strip(), but you need to pass all the non-letter characters to it.

something like: strip(',!*&^%#$;:+')

In [12]: phrase = "hello, this is: a simple; description!!"
In [13]:  [x.strip(',!*&^%#$;:+') for x in phrase.split()]

Out[13]: ['hello', 'this', 'is', 'a', 'simple', 'description']