"j booth" <[email protected]> wrote
I have been experiencing such difficulty with something that should be
easy-- pretty new to programming..
Need to:
(1) open a text file
(2) iterate through it word by word
And here lies the first problem. Programming languages in general
don't know much about words(*) (or paragraphs for that matter). They
know about lines and letters(or characters). So you as programmer
will have to teach OPython what you mean by a word and how to
manipulate them
(*)The exception is regular expressions which do have a comcept
of a word. Whethjer that concept matches yours is another matter
entirely! :-)
(3) replace each word with an alternative word and close the file.
**I don't know what the alternative word will be before running the
script...
We had a somewhat similar thread a few weeks ago it might be
worth searching the archives.
this is a test for testing sake
test
will give the result:
this is a trial for trialing sake
trial
Again Python just replaces a sequence of characters, it has no concept
of a word.
You might be better working with regular expressions where you
can define the pattern to be replaced as a whole word only.
Caveat: Regex are much harder to work with than simple strings.
Be prepared for a lot of trial and error to get the patterns just right.
HTH,
--
Alan Gauld
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/
_______________________________________________
Tutor maillist - [email protected]
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
