How to use regex to delete a specific section of text after a regex match

Question

(No, Python regex, how to delete all matches from a string doesn't solve my problem)

Suppose I have this list:

names = ['your name', 'the name', 'his name', 'her name', 'their name', 'employer name', "employer's name", "father's name",
        "mother's name", "maiden name", "son's name", "daughter's name", "brother's name", "sister's name"]

And suppose I have this piece of text:

text = "What is your name?  Well,  uh it's John Smith.  Thanks for asking. Anyway, I'd doing well."

How do I use regex to find every element of the list names in the text, and replace the block of text (say, of length 50) immediately after the element with " [name] ". So my output would be:

text = "What is your name [name] Anyway, I'd doing well."

So far, I have this code below, but it only replaces the element with " [name] " not the actual text after the element.

def my_replace3(match):
    match = match.group()
    return " [name] "

def no_name(text):
    names = ['your name', 'the name', 'his name', 'her name', 'their name', 'employer name', "employer's name", "father's name",
        "mother's name", "maiden name", "son's name", "daughter's name", "brother's name", "sister's name"]
    regex = re.compile(r'\b(' + '|'.join(names) + r')\b', re.IGNORECASE)
    text = re.sub(regex, my_replace3, text)
    return text

I'm not a great regex expert, so your help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

If you want to replace 50 characters after the match, add .{50} to the regexp.

Then use a back-reference in the replacement string to copy the matched string to the replacement.

def no_name(text):
    names = ['your name', 'the name', 'his name', 'her name', 'their name', 'employer name', "employer's name", "father's name",
        "mother's name", "maiden name", "son's name", "daughter's name", "brother's name", "sister's name"]
    regex = re.compile(r'\b(' + '|'.join(map(re.escape, names)) + r')\b.{50}', re.IGNORECASE)
    text = re.sub(regex, r'\1 [name]', text)
    return text

You should also use re.escape() when inserting strings that should be matched exactly into the regexp, in case any of them contain regexp operators.