replace words

[Scott David Daniels]

Peter Otten wrote:
> hagai26 at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> 
>>What is the way for replacing in a string from . to . the sentence?
>>for example:
>>"been .taken.  it may be .left. there,
>>even if the .live coals were not. cleared"
>>I want to do this-> replace(\.(.*)\.,\.start (1) end\.)
>>result:
>>"been .start taken end.  it may be .start left end. there,
>>even if the .start live coals were not end. cleared"
> 
> 
> Use \1 to refer to the group in the substitution expression.
> You also need to change the regex to non-greedy match (the trailing ?).
> Otherwise you only get one big match from .taken ... not.
> 
> import re
> s = ("been .taken.  it may be .left. there, "
>      "even if the .live coals were not. cleared")
> 
> r = re.compile(r"\.(.*?)\.")
> print r.sub(r".start \1 end.", s)
> 
> Peter
> 
Perhaps you can use a variant of:
     http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/231347

     def wrap(source, pre, post):
         gen = iter(source)
         for portion in gen:
             yield portion
             try:
                 bracketed = gen.next()
             except StopIteration:
                 break
             yield pre
             yield bracketed
             yield post

     def mangledots(string):
         return ''.join(wrap(string.split('.'), '.start ', ' end.'))

print mangledots('been .taken.  it may be .left. there, '
                  'even if the .live coals were not. cleared')

--Scott David Daniels
scott.daniels at acm.org