X-Men Problem¶

Here's a quote from the movie X-Men

quote = r"Dr. Grey, how do you feel about the Senator's Statement? Is there a mutant plot to overthrow the government?"

Given a dynamically generated list of words like the following

searchwords = ['the', 'Dr.', 'to']

highlight each word by wrapping it in a <span></span> tag with class="highlight" as shown below.

Expected result

expected = r"""<span class="highlight">Dr.</span> Grey, how do you feel about <span class="highlight">the</span> Senator's Statement? Is there a mutant plot <span class="highlight">to</span> overthrow <span class="highlight">the</span> government?"""

Here, the should not match in there, to should not match in Senator, and note the non-word . character after Dr in one of the search words. Since the search words are not known at design-time, you need to build the pattern dynamically accounting for the fact these words must be matched as whole words.

Regex Functions

Function	Description	Return Value
`re.findall(pattern, string, flags=0)`	Find all non-overlapping occurrences of pattern in string	list of strings, or list of tuples if > 1 capture group
`re.finditer(pattern, string, flags=0)`	Find all non-overlapping occurrences of pattern in string	iterator yielding match objects
`re.search(pattern, string, flags=0)`	Find first occurrence of pattern in string	match object or `None`
`re.split(pattern, string, maxsplit=0, flags=0)`	Split string by occurrences of pattern	list of strings
`re.sub(pattern, repl, string, count=0, flags=0)`	Replace pattern with repl	new string with the replacement(s)

Regex Patterns

Pattern	Description
`[abc]`	a or b or c
`[^abc]`	not (a or b or c)
`[a-z]`	a or b ... or y or z
`[1-9]`	1 or 2 ... or 8 or 9
`\d`	digits `[0-9]`
`\D`	non-digits `[^0-9]`
`\s`	whitespace `[ \t\n\r\f\v]`
`\S`	non-whitespace `[^ \t\n\r\f\v]`
`\w`	alphanumeric `[a-zA-Z0-9_]`
`\W`	non-alphanumeric `[^a-zA-Z0-9_]`
`.`	any character
`x*`	zero or more repetitions of x
`x+`	one or more repetitions of x
`x?`	zero or one repetitions of x
`{m}`	m repetitions
`{m,n}`	m to n repetitions
`{m,n}`	m to n repetitions
`\\`, `\.`, `\*`	backslash, period, asterisk
`\b`	word boundary
`^hello`	starts with hello
`bye$`	ends with bye
`(...)`	capture group
`(po\|go)`	po or go

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