How to select words with apostrophe using regular expression

Question

I am trying to separate a string into a list, but I need to have the string contain words that are joined by apostrophes. For example :

String="My name is Melvin_JESUS, Guatemala, Dean'Olvier, 501soy...@ 1231 !"

should give me a result as:

['my', 'name', 'is', 'melvin', 'jesus', 'guatemala', '"dean'oliver"', 'soy']

i have tried the following regular expression:

my_patern= r"(?:^|(?<=\s)|-)[A-Za-z'\.]+(?=\s|\t|$|\b)"

but doesn't give me the desired results.

Answer 1

You may use

(?<![^\W\d_])[^\W\d_]+(?:['.][^\W\d_]+)*(?![^\W\d_])

See the regex demo

Details

• (?<![^\\W\\d_]) - no letter right before the match is allowed
• [^\\W\\d_]+ - 1 or more letters
• (?:['.][^\\W\\d_]+)* - 0 or more sequences of ' or . and then 1+ letters
• (?![^\\W\\d_]) - no letter right after the match is allowed.

In Python, use

re.findall(r'(?<![^\W\d_])[^\W\d_]+(?:['.][^\W\d_]+)*(?![^\W\d_])', text)