How to slice a string input at a certain unknown index
A way to find the question's first word index would be to search for the first word that has an actual meaning (you're interested in English words I suppose). A way to do that would be using pyenchant
:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import enchant
GLOSSARY = enchant.Dict("en_US")
def isWord(word):
return True if GLOSSARY.check(word) else False
sentences = [
"eo000 ATATAT EG\n\nWhat is your name?\nkgda dasflkjasn",
"What is your\nlastname and email?\ndasf?lkjas",
"\nGiven your skills\nhow would you rate yourself?\nand your name? dasf?"]
for sentence in sentences:
for i,w in enumerate(sentence.split()):
if isWord(w):
print('index: {} => {}'.format(i, w))
break
The above piece of code gives as a result:
index: 3 => What
index: 0 => What
index: 0 => Given
You could try a regular expression like \b[A-Z][a-z][^?]+\?
, meaning:
- The start of a word
\b
with an upper case letter[A-Z]
followed by a lower case letter[a-z]
, - then a sequence of non-questionmark-characters
[^?]+
, - followed by a literal question mark
\?
.
This can still have some false positives or misses, e.g. if a question actually starts with an acronym, or if there is a name in the middle of the question, but for you examples it works quite well.
>>> tests = ["eo000 ATATAT EG\n\nWhat is your name?\nkgda dasflkjasn",
"What is your\nlastname and email?\ndasf?lkjas",
"\nGiven your skills\nhow would you rate yourself?\nand your name? dasf?"]
>>> import re
>>> p = r"\b[A-Z][a-z][^?]+\?"
>>> [re.search(p, t).group() for t in tests]
['What is your name?',
'What is your\nlastname and email?',
'Given your skills\nhow would you rate yourself?']
If that's one blob of text, you can use findall
instead of search
:
>>> text = "\n".join(tests)
>>> re.findall(p, text)
['What is your name?',
'What is your\nlastname and email?',
'Given your skills\nhow would you rate yourself?']
Actually, this also seems to work reasonably well for questions with names in them:
>>> t = "asdGARBAGEasd\nHow did you like St. Petersburg? more stuff with ?"
>>> re.search(p, t).group()
'How did you like St. Petersburg?'