Question

Lets say I have this string:

myString="'Hello'+yes+'Whats hello'6"

I am looking for a way to delete everything enclosed in quotes

So, it would become:

"+yes+"

Because, ‘Hello’ and ‘Whats hello’ are enclosed by quotes. And 6 is a number.

Is there a way to do this? Maybe using Regular Expressions? I tried doing this with a For Loop, but I guess my logic wasn’t that great.

Answer 1

Python 2.7.2 (default, Aug 19 2011, 20:41:43) [GCC] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import re
>>> re.sub(r"('[^']*'|\d)", "", "'Hello'+yes+'Whats hello'6")
'+yes+'
>>>

(...|...) matches one thing or another; '[^']*' matches anything but a quote inside quotes; \d matches digits. re.sub(pattern, replacement, string) replaces each instance of pattern with the replacement.

ps note that the ' in the result are just python putting quotes around the string! (you can use single or double quotes in python; python prefers single when printing strings, if the string itself doesn’t contain any).

update – is this what you want?

>>> import re
>>> re.sub(r"('[^']*'|(?<![a-zA-Z])\d(?![a-zA-Z]))", "", "'Hello'+yes+'Whats hello'6")
'+yes+'
>>> re.sub(r"('[^']*'|(?<![a-zA-Z])\d(?![a-zA-Z]))", "", "+ye5s")
'+ye5s'