Is there any way to read a member from a list based on its content?-CodePudding

I am a beginner in python trying to make a chatbot for a project in college. We just started this year and our professor asked us to do one, so I am trying to brainstorm ways that I can implement into my project. I learned about the Wikipedia module and I would like to use it to answer basic "what is X" and "who is Y" questions. I was planning to do so by telling the user to input a question, then splitting the question by word and storing each word in a list. Then I wanted the program to compare those words to words in a "keyword list" where if certain words matched the bot would print out a response.

I wanted to make it so the bot knew that after the word "what"(or "who") in the question there might exist a word that is important to the question, and I wanted it to put that word through the Wikipedia summary method.

I was trying something like this:

def storeInput():
    question = input("Ask me a question! No typos please tho.")
    words = question.split()
    return words

def not_understand():
    print("Unfortunately I couldn't understand what you meant to say... could you repeat again? Be careful"
      " with wording.")

def answer_w_questions():
    key=["what", "who"]

    for word in words:
        if word in key:
            print(wikipedia.summary(#important word))
        else:
            not_understand()

However as you can see I don't know how I can make the bot pick the correct word to use on the Wikipedia summary. Is there any way I can make it detect the proper word to search, or is my current of thought not efficient for the program?

CodePudding user response：

the bot knew that after the word "what"(or "who") in the question there might exist a word that is important to the question

There are several ways to do this.

You might also be interested in having a look at ntlk or spacy for tokenization / stemming

1. String splitting

The simplest one is to split the string:

>>> question = "Who is the president?"
>>> question.lower().split("who")
['', ' is the president?']

As you can see, split returns what was before "who" and what comes after it. So question.lower.split(key)[1] gives you everything after the keyword.

2. Regex

You could also look at regular expressions (regex): https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html

3. List index

>>> question = "Who is the president?"
>>> key = "who"
>>> words = question.lower().split()
>>> key_index = words.index(key)
>>> words
['who', 'is', 'the', 'president?']
>>> key_index  # starts with 0
0

CodePudding user response：

Rather than for word in words, consider using the built-in enumerate (doc) function to make your iterator. This will allow you to reference both the word (to see if it is a key) but also its position within the list. By knowing its position, you can also reference words in positions relative to it.