Remove #{word} from a string using regex (python)

Question

I'm not familiar with regex, and it would be great to have some help.

I have a string: string = "You get #{turns} guesses." and I would like to remove #{turns} in order to have string = "You get guesses."

I've tried it with:

string = re.sub(re.compile('#{.*?}'),"",string)

Any suggestions?

Mohammad Yusuf · Accepted Answer · 2017-01-27 16:20:04Z

2

For this specific question you can also do it like so:

import re

string = "You get #{turns} guesses."
re.sub(r'#\S+ ', r'', string)

Output:

'You get guesses.'

Regex:

'#\S+ ' Match # and match as many non space characters and a single space.

answered Jan 27, 2017 at 16:06

Mohammad Yusuf

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Comments

willeM_ Van Onsem · Accepted Answer · 2017-01-27 16:04:22Z

Your code works, except that it does not remove a sufficient amount of spaces and that compilation is rather useless if you only use it once:

>>> string = "You get #{turns} guesses."
>>> string = re.sub(re.compile('#{.*?}'),"",string)
>>> string
'You get  guesses.'

So you probably want to compile the regex once, and then use it, and you better alter it to - for instance - remove tailing spaces:

rgx = re.compile('#{.*?}\s*')
string = rgx.sub('',string)

Note the \s* which will match with an arbitrary amount of spaces after the tag, and thus remove these as well:

>>> string = "You get #{turns} guesses."
>>> rgx = re.compile('#{.*?}\s*')
>>> string = rgx.sub('',string)
>>> string
'You get guesses.'

In case it is one word between the curly brackets ({}), you better use \w to exclude spaces:

rgx = re.compile('#{\w*}\s*')