Try/Except/Yield/Finally...I'm Lost :-}

[Victor Subervi]

Hi;
I am trying to find words in a document that are identical to any word in a
vocabulary list, to replace that word with special markup. Let's say the
word is "dharma". I don't want to replace the first few letters of, say
"dharmawuhirfuhi". Also, to make matters more difficult, if the word
"adharma" is found in the document, I need to replace that with special
markup, too. (In Sanskrit, "a" preceding a word negates the word.) But I
don't want to replace "adharma" and then go off and replace the "dharma" in
"adharma", thus having nested markup. Now, I tried separating out all the
words in the line (I go through the doc line by line), but then, of course,
I lost all the punctuation! So now I have this code:

                for word in vocab:
                        aword = "a" + word
                        try:
                                line = re.sub(aword, pu_four + aword +
pu_five + aword + pu_six, line)
                        except:
                                pass
                        try:
                                line = re.sub(word, pu_one + word + pu_two +
word + pu_three, line)
                        except:
                                pass

which, of course, ends up breaking all the above! Can someone send me a
shovel to dig my way out of this mess?
TIA,
Victor
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