Get the indices of numbers in a string and extract words before and after the number (in different languages)

Question

I tried using regex and found numbers but not finding the indices for the entire number, instead getting index it only for the first character in the number

text = "४०० pounds of wheat at $ 3 per pound"
numero = re.finditer(r"(\d+)", text) ####
op = re.findall(r"(\d+)", text) ####

indices = [m.start() for m in numero]
OUTPUT

[0, 25]

***Expected OUTPUT***
[0, 6]

After finding the exact indices and storing in a list, it would be easier to extract the words. This is what I believe? What do you think?

Also, I am expecting words at different positions so it cannot be a static approach

Answer 1

You tagged the question with nlp tag and it is a python question, why don't you use Spacy ?

See an Python demo with Spacy 3.0.1:

import spacy
nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_trf")
text = "४०० pounds of wheat at $ 3 per pound"
doc = nlp(text)
print([(token.text, token.i) for token in doc if token.is_alpha])
## => [('pounds', 1), ('of', 2), ('wheat', 3), ('at', 4), ('per', 7), ('pound', 8)]
## => print([(token.text, token.i) for token in doc if token.like_num])
[('४००', 0), ('3', 6)]

Here,

• nlp object is initialized with the English "big" model
• doc is the Spacy document initialized with your text variable
• [(token.text, token.i) for token in doc if token.is_alpha] gets you a list of letter words with their values ( token.text ) and their positions in the document ( token.i )
• [(token.text, token.i) for token in doc if token.like_num] fetches the list of numbers with their positions inside the document.

Answer 2

You can tokenize it and build your logic that way. Try this:

number_index = []
text = "४०० pounds of wheat at $ 3 per pound"
text_list = text.split(" ")

# Find which words are integers.
for index, word in enumerate(text_list):
    try:
        int(word)
        number_index.append(index)
    except:
        pass

# Now perform operations on those integers
for i in number_index:
    word = text_list[i]
    # do operations and put it back in the list

# Re-build string afterwards