Python Regex Matching - Splitting on punctuation but ignoring certain words

Question

Suppose I have the following sentence,

Hi, my name is Dr. Who. I'm in love with fish-fingers and custard !!

I'm trying to capture the punctuation (except the apostrophe and hyphen) using regular expressions, but I also want to ignore certain words. For example, I'm ignoring Dr., and so I don't want to capture the . in the word Dr.

Ideally, the regex should capture the text in between the parentheses:

Hi(, )my( )name( )is( )Dr.( )Who(. )I'm( )in( )love( )with( )fish-fingers( )and( )custard( !!)

Note that I have a Python list that contains words like "Dr." that I want to ignore. I'm also using string.punctuation to get a list of punctuation characters to use in the regex. I've tried using negative lookahead but it was still catching the "." in Dr. Any help appreciated!

Answer 1

you can throw away at first all your stop words (like "Dr.") and then all letters (and digits).

import re

text = "Hi, my name is Dr. Who. I'm in love with fish-fingers and custard !!"
tmp = re.sub(r'[Dr.|Prof.]', '', text)
print(re.sub('[a-zA-Z0-9]*', '', tmp))

Would that work?

it would print:

,      '    -   !!

The output is capturing the text in between the parentheses, in your question.