I need to turn strings into a certain format:

#1 - New York to New York

#4 - London to London

etc.

I did originally just remove special characters, however this included spaces and therefore I had errors such as NewYork.

My orignal way:

''.join(filter(str.isalpha, myString))

So I basically need to remove the #, number, spaces (before the city name starts) and the -

CodePudding user response：

I suggest splitting the string into two chunks with ' - ' substring, and grab the last chunk:

result = myString.split(' - ', 1)[-1]

See a Python demo:

texts = ['#1 - New York', '#4 - London']
for myString in texts:
    print( myString, '=>', myString.split(' - ', 1)[-1] )

Output:

#1 - New York => New York
#4 - London => London

Regarding the regex solution, you might want to remove any non-letters at the start of the string with re.sub(r'^[\W\d_] ', '', myString) or re.sub(r'^[^a-zA-Z] ', '', myString). Note [\W\d_] is a fully Unicode aware pattern while ^[^a-zA-Z] is ASCII only.

CodePudding user response：

If you still want to use regex despite having the simpler approach with split:

#\d \s*-\s*(.*)

• # matches the # symbol
• \d matches at least one digit after
• \s* matches any whitespace that could follow
• - matches the hyphen
• \s* matches any whitespace that could follow
• (.*) creates a capture group for all the other characters up until a line break

Then to match:

import re
match = re.search(r"#\d \s*-\s*(.*)", "#1 - New York")
if match:
    result = match.group(1)
    print(result)