python使用正则表达式提取大写单词

Question

I want to extract the word which is capital and occurs 3 or 4 before word "cell" or "cells"

example :

Briefly, MCF-7 idential cells grown as described above were treated with a range of LTX-diol or iso-LTX-diol.

I would like to extract MCF-7 from above example.

I tried to use [A-Z0-9-]+cells , but its returning cells, instead of MCF-7

Answer 1

This answer assumes that you want to match a word beginning with a capital letter, which in turn is followed by 1 to 4 other words, followed then by cell or cells . We can try matching using the following pattern:

([A-Z][^ ]*)(?=\s+(?:[^A-Z]\S*\s+){1,4}cells?)

The positive lookahead at the end of the pattern asserts the requirement for 1 to 4 words occurring before cell or cells .

input = "Briefly, MCF-7 idential cells grown as described above were treated with a range of LTX-diol or iso-LTX-diol."

r1 = re.findall(r"([A-Z][^ ]*)(?=\s+(?:[^A-Z]\S*\s+){1,4}cells?)", input)
print(r1)

['MCF-7']