How to compare each word of a string with another string. Python

Question

I'm new to python and I'm really struggling with this issue. I want to find whether a certain word from string1 exists in string2. And I need to compare each word of string1 with string2?

count  = len(string2.split())
print(count)
c=0
string1 = "I had a nice day. Infact, I had a great day! Yes sir."
string2 = "nice great sir day lol"

count  = len(string2.split())
print(count)
c=0

i =1
while i<=count:

  if string2[i].split(" ") in string1.split(" "):
    c+= 1
  i += 1

print(c)

Abzac · Accepted Answer · 2019-09-13 13:32:11Z

1

No problem!

string1_words = set(string1.split())
string2_words = set(string2.split())
common_words = string1_words & string2_words
print(common_words)

answered Sep 13, 2019 at 13:32

Abzac

2,6525 gold badges23 silver badges24 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Comments

Spencer Stream · Accepted Answer · 2019-09-13 15:02:54Z

1

Abzac's answer works for any words that match exactly. For your input:

string1 = "I had a nice day. Infact, I had a great day! Yes sir."
string2 = "nice great sir day lol"

The resulting matching words will be

{'nice', 'great'}

You may want to strip punctuation or extra characters. If instead you use the code:

string1_words = set(string1.split())
string2_words = set(string2.split())

# Any characters you want to ignore when comparing
unwanted_characters = ".,!?"

string1_words = {word.strip(unwanted_characters) for word in string1_words}
string2_words = {word.strip(unwanted_characters) for word in string2_words}
common_words = string1_words & string2_words
print(common_words)

You will get the matching words as

{'nice', 'great', 'day', 'sir'}

One step further, you can ignore case as well using:

string1_words = {word.strip(unwanted_characters).lower() for word in string1_words}

This would match "Wow!" with "wow".

answered Sep 13, 2019 at 15:02

Spencer Stream

6162 gold badges6 silver badges24 bronze badges

1 Comment

Abzac Over a year ago

It would be even better not to strip words, because it would only remove characters from the beginning and the end of the string, but to replace all unwanted characters, i.e.to leave only letters and digits: import re; preprared_string = re.sub(r'[^\w]+', ' ', original_string);. It would solve even more cases! For example, if someone forgot to put space in the middle of the word: "Hello!Nice to meet you, my friend!". Moreover, the solution would help to remove characters you did not specify at all! i.e. ':' or '\', or '-', and etc.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

How to compare each word of a string with another string. Python

2 Answers 2

Comments

1 Comment

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

Comments

1 Comment

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related