Question

I’m struggling with the problem to cut the very first sentence from the string.
It wouldn’t be such a problem if I there were no abbreviations ended with dot.

So my example is:

• string = ‘I like cheese, cars, etc. but my the most favorite website is stackoverflow. My new horse is called Randy.’

And the result should be:

• result = ‘I like cheese, cars, etc. but my the most favorite website is stackoverflow.’

Normally I would do with:

re.findall(r'^(\s*.*?\s*)(?:\.|$)', event)

but I would like to skip some pre-defined words, like above mentioned etc.

I came with couple of expression but none of them worked.

Answer 1

You could try NLTK’s Punkt sentence tokenizer, which does this kind of thing using a real algorithm to figure out what the abbreviations are instead of your ad-hoc collection of abbreviations.

NLTK includes a pre-trained one for English; load it with:

nltk.data.load('tokenizers/punkt/english.pickle')

From the source code:

>>> sent_detector = nltk.data.load('tokenizers/punkt/english.pickle')
>>> print '\n-----\n'.join(sent_detector.tokenize(text.strip()))
Punkt knows that the periods in Mr. Smith and Johann S. Bach
do not mark sentence boundaries.
-----
And sometimes sentences 
can start with non-capitalized words.
-----
i is a good variable
name.