在字符串中的子字符串旁边找到所有定界符，并在python中替换

Question

Sample string:

s = "<sec>John</sec> said hi to a woman (named <sec>Mary)</sec>"

I need to transform this to:

s = "<sec>John</sec> said hi to a woman (named <sec>Mary</sec>)"

This would need to work on both the start and end tag and for all delimiters like ".", ",", "-", "(", ")" and so on.

I could just do a search and replace for ")" and so on, but obviously I would like something a bit more sexy.

So basically move all delimiters outside the tag.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The below regex would help you to move the delimiter which is present inside the opening and closing tag to the next of the closing tag.

(<sec>)([^.,()-]*)([.,()-])(<\/sec>)

REplacement string:

\1\2\4\3

DEMO

>>> s = "<sec>John</sec> said hi to a woman (named <sec>Mary)</sec>"
>>> re.sub(r'(<sec>)([^.,()-]*)([.,()-])(<\/sec>)', r'\1\2\4\3', s)
'<sec>John</sec> said hi to a woman (named <sec>Mary</sec>)'

OR

This would work for any tags,

>>> s = "<sec>John</sec> said hi to a woman (named <sec>Mary)</sec>"
>>> re.sub(r'(<(\S+?\b)[^>]*>)([^.,()-]*)([.,()-])(<\/\2>)', r'\1\3\5\4', s)
'<sec>John</sec> said hi to a woman (named <sec>Mary</sec>)'

Answer 2

An other regex variation:

>>> s = "Nicely<sec>, John</sec> said hi to a woman (named <sec>Mary)</sec>"
>>> re.sub(r'((?:<[^>]+>)?)( *[-.(),]+ *)((?:</[^>]+>)?)',r'\3\2\1',s)
#                           ^^        ^^
#                  move spaces with the punctuation
#                     remove that if not needed

'Nicely, <sec>John</sec> said hi to a woman (named <sec>Mary</sec>)'

The idea is to swap opening tags ↔ punctuation or punctuation ↔ closing tag.