related to python

[Dan Upton]

This looks like a homework assignment, but...

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 10:34 PM, salil_reeves <salil_reeves at yahoo.co.in> wrote:
> develop a function called standardise_phrase to convert
> the user's input to a standard form for subsequent processing. This
> involves:
> 1. removing all inter-word punctuation, which for our purposes is
> assumed to
> consist only of commas (`,'), full stops (`.'), exclamation marks
> (`!') or
> question marks (`?');

I think a question similar to this was answered on the list today or
yesterday, for removing spaces and hyphens.

> 2. stripping away any leading and trailing blank spaces; and

If your solution for part 1 can't be extended to cover this... you
might have to find another way to "strip" the the spaces ;)

> 3. replacing words in the user's input with ELIZA's preferred
> vocabulary.

Assuming you have some sort of dictionary mapping words to ELIZA
words, you should be able to iterate through all of the words in the
input and, using that dictionary, swap the key for the value in your
input string.

There, I think those are sufficiently vague as to not do your homework
for you, but maybe get you started...