replacing a single charater in a string using regexes in a list

Question

the thing is that i had names in my list that were of the format... ['john a, smith,william tell,jacob oram'] now i wanted to correct the first name (john a smith being one complete name) but due to the format of the raw data it came out like this...now using this method i found all such names using

ab=re.search((r'[A-Z][a-z]+ [A-Z]\,[A-Z][a-z]+'),zz[uy])

where zz[uy] is the location of the string...

now what i want is that i want is that i just want to replace the name in the correct format of john a. smith,william tell,jacob oram in the list...please help out basically all that i want to do is replace the "," after "a" in john a, smith with a "." and place it back in the string

also names like these are in a list...and can be multiple in a string and also they can be anywhere... — irfanbukhari
– irfanbukhari, Commented Jan 18, 2012 at 11:24

Tim Pietzcker · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-18 11:28:30Z

1

You haven't defined exactly how to decide which commas to replace, and it's probably going to be very hard to find a rule that always works correctly, given how variable names can be.

So I suggest as a first approximation to replace a comma if and only if it follows a single letter:

>>> import re
>>> a = "John A, Smith, william tell, jacob oram"
>>> re.sub(r"(?<=\b\w),", ".", a)
'John A. Smith, william tell, jacob oram'

Caveat: \w also matches digits and underscores, but it's probably better than [A-Z], otherwise you'd miss out on names with non-ASCII characters)

answered Jan 18, 2012 at 11:28

Tim Pietzcker

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