Counting elements in a list wildcard

[John Machin]

On 25/04/2006 8:51 PM, Iain King wrote:
> John Machin wrote:
>> On 25/04/2006 6:26 PM, Iain King wrote:
>>> hawkesed wrote:
>>>> If I have a list, say of names. And I want to count all the people
>>>> named, say, Susie, but I don't care exactly how they spell it (ie,
>>>> Susy, Susi, Susie all work.) how would I do this? Set up a regular
>>>> expression inside the count? Is there a wildcard variable I can use?
>>>> Here is the code for the non-fuzzy way:
>>>> lstNames.count("Susie")
>>>> Any ideas? Is this something you wouldn't expect count to do?
>>>> Thanks y'all from a newbie.
> 
> snip
> 
>>> steven = re.compile("Ste(v|ph|f)(e|a)n")
>> What about Steffan, Etienne, Esteban, István, ... ?
>>
> 
> well, obviously these could be included:
> "(Ste(v|ph|f)(e|a)n|Steffan|Etienne|Esteban)", but the OP never said he
> wanted to translate anything into another language.

Neither did I. But if you have to cope with a practical situation like 
where the birth certificate says István and the job application says 
Steven and the foreman calls him Steve, you won't be stuffing about with 
hand-crafted REs, one per popular given name. Could be worse: the punter 
could have looked up a dictionary and changed his surname from Kovács to 
Smith; believe me -- it happens.

Oh and if you cast your net as wide as the Pacific islands, chuck in 
Sitiveni. That's enough examples. We won't go near Benjamin :-)