Question

I’m trying to create a query that filters tweets by the @ or # tags.

So I just want the results for either @Obama or #Obama but not Obama. This is what I have so far:

re.compile(r'\b(?:#|@|)*%s*\b' % re.escape(obama), re.IGNORECASE)

Thanks for the replies….I tries both answers and what seems to work in my situation is:

 re.compile(r'\b[#@]*%s\b' % re.escape(term), re.IGNORECASE)  

‘term’ is an element in a list which I iterate over. This then returns tweets that has either a # or @ pre-pended to the ‘term’. Itried not using ‘*’ but It was giving out exceptions.

Thanks

Answer 1

Try using this regular expression:

r'\b[#@]{name}\b'.format(name=re.escape('Obama'))

Character class [%@] works faster then choice group (?:#|@).

So, we begin with word boundary \b, then follows # or @. Then goes substitute from obama variable. Then goes the trailing boundary.

In the question you used * quantifiers which repeat the previous expression from 0 to infinity times. There is no reason to repeat # and @ symbols. Also, the last sybmol of obama shouldn’t be repeated either.