Python，使用正则表达式消除尖括号内的线条

Question

I'm writing a python script to assign grammatical categories to words in several text files. In each text file, I have file headers within angle brackets <>. Throughout the texts there are also additional lines with information such as time stamps, page numbers, and questions from the transcriber. I want to remove these lines. This is basically what the text files look like:

<title      Titipuru Supay>
<speaker    name>
<sex        female>
<dialect    Pastaza>
<register   narrative>
<contributor    name>

chan; payguna serenkya man chiga; 
<ima?> 
payguna kirina man, chiga, mana 
shayachira; ninagunan shi tujsirani nira: 
illaparani nira shi illapay 
<173> 
pasasha, ima shi kasna nin, nisha,

Even though there are the same number of headers in each file the other <> material varies, so I can't just eliminate specific lines. So I thought I'd try something simple like a re.sub statement that removes everything inbetween <> and including the brackets.

with open(file, encoding='utf-8') as file_in:
        text = file_in.read()
        re.sub(r"<.*>", " ", text)

I tried <.*> on pythex.org and regex101 it worked in both places with a test string, but not in my script (yes I have import re). I also tried other solutions like: \\<.*\\>

Am I just not getting the regex right or there something deeper here?

Answer 1

Strings are immutable , meaning they cannot be modified, only reassigned. The re.sub(...) is working, but it's returning a new string. Try this:

text = re.sub(r"<.*>", " ", text)

If this still doesn't work, please give us more information about your problem

Answer 2

From what I understand, you may have several <...> on the same line. In this case, you are much safer with a negated character class solution:

text = re.sub(r"<[^>]*>", " ", text)

The text variable, of course, should be updated as Python strings are immutable, and the regex is now matching < , then zero or more characters other than > , and then > .

See the regex demo