replace only full words

[cerr]

On Saturday, September 28, 2013 4:54:35 PM UTC, Tim Chase wrote:
> On 2013-09-28 09:11, cerr wrote:
> 
> > I have a list of sentences and a list of words. Every full word
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> > that appears within sentence shall be extended by <WORD> i.e. "I
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> > drink in the house." Would become "I <drink> in the <house>." (and
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> > not "I <d<rink> in the <house>.")
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> This is a good place to reach for regular expressions.  It comes with
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> a "ensure there is a word-boundary here" token, so you can do
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> something like the code at the (way) bottom of this email.  I've
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> pushed it off the bottom in the event you want to try and use regexps
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> on your own first.  Or if this is homework, at least make you work a
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> *little* :-)
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> 
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> > Also, is there a way to make it faster?
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> The code below should do the processing in roughly O(n) time as it
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> only makes one pass through the data and does O(1) lookups into your
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> set of nouns.  I included code in the regexp to roughly find
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> contractions and hyphenated words.  Your original code grows slower
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> as your list of nouns grows bigger and also suffers from
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> multiple-replacement issues (if you have the noun-list of ["drink",
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> "rink"], you'll get results that you don't likely want.
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> My code hasn't considered case differences, but you should be able to
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> normalize both the list of nouns and the word you're testing in the
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> "modify()" function so that it would find "Drink" as well as "drink"
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> Also, note that some words serve both as nouns and other parts of
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> speech, e.g. "It's kind of you to house me for the weekend and drink
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> tea with me."
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> -tkc
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> import re
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> r = re.compile(r"""
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>   \b    # assert a word boundary
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>   \w+   # 1+ word characters
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>   (?:   # a group
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>    [-']  # a dash or apostrophe
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>    \w+   # followed by 1+ word characters
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>    )?    # make the group optional (0 or 1 instances)
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>   \b    # assert a word boundary here
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>   """, re.VERBOSE)
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> nouns = set([
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>   "drink",
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>   "house",
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>   ])
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> def modify(matchobj):
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>   word = matchobj.group(0)
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>   if word in nouns:
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>     return "<%s>" % word
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>   else:
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>     return word
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> print r.sub(modify, "I drink in the house")

Great, only I don't have the re module on my system.... :(