[Tutor] finding special character string

[Marilyn Davis]

On Tue, June 3, 2008 2:13 am, Dinesh B Vadhia wrote:

> Yes, I'm happy because I found a non-regex way to solve the problem (see
> below).
>
> No, I'm not a student or worn out but wish I was back at college and
> partying!
>
> Yes, this is an interesting problem and here is the requirement:
>
>
> - A text document contains special words that start and end with a period
> ("."), the word between the start and end periods contain no punctuation
> or spaces except a hyphen in some special words. - Examples of special
> words include ".thrfore.", ".because.", '.music-sharp.", ".music-flat.",
> ".dbd.", ".vertline.", ".uparw.", ".hoarfrost." etc.
> - In most cases, the special words have a space (" ") before and after.

Here I might think that I should capture leading and trailing white space
and be careful to not put two spaces in a row in the result.


> - In some cases, a special word will be followed by one or two other
> special words eg. ".dbd..vertline." or ".music-flat..dbd..vertline." - In
> some cases, a special word will be followed by an ordinary word (with or
> without punctuation) eg. ".music-flat.mozart" or ".vertline.isn't" - A
> special word followed by an ordinary word (with or without punctuation)
> could be the end of a sentence and hence have a full-stop (".") eg.
> ".music-flat.mozart." or ".vertline.isn't."
> - The number of characters in a special word excluding the two periods is
> > 1
> - Find and remove all special words from the text document (by processing
> one line at a time)
>
> How did I solve it?  I found a list of all the special words, created a

And here I might think that finding a list of all special words, unless
you found them using Python on the text file, isn't quite what was
intended.

It is really hard to write specifications.

It seems like you learned a lot!

Marilyn Davis

> set of special words and then checked if each word in the text belonged
> to the set of special words.  If we assume that the list of special words
> doesn't exist then the problem is interesting in itself to solve.
>
> Cheers!
>
>
> Dinesh
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> -------
>
>
> Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 21:56:26 -0400
> From: "Kent Johnson" <kent37 at tds.net>
> Subject: Re: [Tutor] finding special character string
> To: "Marilyn Davis" <marilyn at deliberate.com>
> Cc: tutor at python.org
> Message-ID:
> <1c2a2c590806011856x1875665ep690353c7c2ebc3da at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 9:41 PM, Marilyn Davis <marilyn at deliberate.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>> Yeh, we need a better spec. I was wondering if the stuff between the
>> text ought not include white space, or even a word boundary.  A
>> character class might be better, if we knew.
>
> Hmm, yes, my regex will find many ordinary sentences in plain text.
>
>
>> Anyhow, I think we wore out the student. :^)
>>
>
> He went away happy after my first reply.
>
>
> Kent