replace only full words

[MRAB]

On 28/09/2013 17:11, cerr wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a list of sentences and a list of words. Every full word that appears within sentence shall be extended by <WORD> i.e. "I drink in the house." Would become "I <drink> in the <house>." (and not "I <d<rink> in the <house>.")I have attempted it like this:
>    for sentence in sentences:
>      for noun in nouns:
>        if " "+noun+" " in sentence or " "+noun+"?" in sentence or " "+noun+"!" in sentence or " "+noun+"." in sentence:
> 	sentence = sentence.replace(noun, '<' + noun + '>')
>
>      print(sentence)
>
> but what if The word is in the beginning of a sentence and I also don't like the approach using defined word terminations. Also, is there a way to make it faster?
>
It sounds like a regex problem to me:

import re

nouns = ["drink", "house"]

pattern = re.compile(r"\b(" + "|".join(nouns) + r")\b")

for sentence in sentences:
     sentence = pattern.sub(r"<\g<0>>", sentence)
     print(sentence)