带有条件的Python正则表达式剥离标点符号

Question

I have a dataframe of various company names, and I need to be able to perform a groupby function on them. However, the company names are often law firms, which can be presented in a variety of different ways (ie. "Akin Gump", "Akin, Gump", "Akin,Gump", "Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP", "Akin Gump Strauss Hauer Feld", you get the idea).

My current code, below, works well in most situations, except where the spacing is wrong in the original text - like "Akin,Gump" (which becomes "AkinGump") or "Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP" which becomes "Akin Gump Strauss Hauer Feld" (two spaces between Hauer and Feld).

table = string.maketrans("", "")
company_name = company_name.translate(table, string.punctuation)
stopwords = ['LLC', 'INC', 'PLLC', 'LP', 'LTD', 'PLC', 'LLP']
company_name = ' '.join(filter(lambda x: x not in stopwords, company_name.split()))

I assume there is a regex solution, but I am not good at that at all.

Answer 1

I'd make a first passthrough with regex to correct the offending characters so that they don't cause issues in the rest of the code:

import re

re.sub(" *[&,] *"," ", company_name) #Add any other special characters you might want

This will replace any special characters and all the spaces surrounding them with just a single spaces, meaning that it will successfully go through the rest of your code without issue.