Search and replace some text in strings in Python?

Question

I would like to search in a text of multiple lines to see if each line has sentence=" followed by some text and ended with " />'. If yes, see if the text between sentence=" and " />' has ", if yes, replace it with '. For example, one such line is:

<number="4" word="start" sentence="I said, "start!"" />

I would like to change it to be

<number="4" word="start" sentence="I said, 'start!'" />

Note that such cases can happen more than once in each single line of the text.

I wonder how to use regex in Python to accomplish that? Thanks!

I assume your example's sentence attribute is supposed to be instance? (or vice versa) — roippi
– roippi, Commented Mar 18, 2014 at 0:58

roippi · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-18 01:10:11Z

3

You can provide a callable to re.sub to tell it what to replace the match object with:

s = """<number="4" word="start" sentence="I said, "start!"" />"""

re.sub(r'(?<=sentence=")(.*)(?=" />)', lambda m: m.group().replace('"',"'"), s)
Out[179]: '<number="4" word="start" sentence="I said, \'start!\'" />'

answered Mar 18, 2014 at 1:10

roippi

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1 Comment

thefourtheye Over a year ago

+1 I coulnt get the last " right, with re.sub(r'sentence="(.*)"\s*/>', lambda x: x.group(0).replace('"', "'"), data) :(

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