how to remove parantheses and string from a string

Question

Literally, I've been trying to a way to solve this but it seems that I'm poor on regex;)

I need to remove (WindowsPath and )"from the strings in a list

     x= ["(WindowsPath('D:/test/1_birds_bp.png'),WindowsPath('D:/test/1_eagle_mp.png'))", "(WindowsPath('D:/test/2_reptiles_bp.png'),WindowsPath('D:/test/2_crocodile_mp.png'))"]

So I tried

 import re
 cleaned_x = [re.sub("(?<=WindowsPath\(').*?(?='\))",'',a) for a in x]

outputs

["(WindowsPath(''),WindowsPath(''))", "(WindowsPath(''),WindowsPath(''))"]

what I need to have is;

cleaned_x= [('D:/test/1_birds_bp.png','D:/test/1_eagle_mp.png'), ('D:/test/2_reptiles_bp.png','D:/test/2_crocodile_mp.png')]

basically tuples in a list.

Why use `re` when every string starts with `( WindowsPath (...))` wouldn't it be easy to use slicing? — Ch3steR, Feb 21 '20 at 05:34
just curious - is there a need to use regexp's if you just want to remove them (and they are fixed substrings you want removed right)? couldn't you use standard string replace() function? — Richard, Feb 21 '20 at 05:37
@Richard anything that gives the expected result would work for me;) — Alexander, Feb 21 '20 at 05:38
...actually I looked again, I think you do need to use regexp. ...hang on a sec :D — Richard, Feb 21 '20 at 05:39
@Richard You guys are excellent help! Thanks for your time and efforts! This is a wonderful community! — Alexander, Feb 21 '20 at 05:44

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 21 '20 at 05:34

You can accomplish this by using re.findall like this:

>>> cleaned_x = [tuple(re.findall(r"[A-Z]:/[^']+", a)) for a in x]
>>> cleaned_x
[('D:/test/1_birds_bp.png', 'D:/test/1_eagle_mp.png'), ('D:/test/2_reptiles_bp.png', 
'D:/test/2_crocodile_mp.png')]
>>>

Hope it helps.

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 21 '20 at 05:40

2

Perhaps you could use capturing groups? For instance:

import re

re_winpath = re.compile(r'^\(WindowsPath\(\'(.*)\'\)\,WindowsPath\(\'(.*)\'\)\)$')

def extract_pair(s):
    m = re_winpath.match(s)
    if m is None:
        raise ValueError(f"cannot extract pair from string: {s}")
    return m.groups()

pairs = list(map(extract_pair, x))

answered Feb 21 '20 at 05:40

Kris

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Thanks a lot! Really appriciate for the flow! – Alexander Feb 21 '20 at 05:44

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 21 '20 at 05:47

Here's my take,

not pretty, and I did it in two steps so as not to make regexp spagetti, and you could turn it into a list comprehension if you like, but it should work

for a in x:
    a = re.sub('(\()?WindowsPath', '', a)
    a = re.sub('\)$','', a)
    print(a)

how to remove parantheses and string from a string

3 Answers3