I have a sentence that has a specific format. <subject> <action> <object> @ <price> ... // The sentence can continue and I want to extract these values out of the sentence. Constraints: The subject is always Bob or Alice Action is either bought or sold The object can be any word of 1-7 letters // 4apples should return NULL Price is either a float/integer There can be sentences before subject but guaranteed to not contain Bob/Alice. There may or may not be a space after @ Example: Hi there, Bob sold apples @2.0 dollars each Desired Output: Subject: Bob Action: sold Object: apples Price: 2.0 Currently, I do it the naive way by: #!/usr/bin/env python3 sentence = "Hi there, alice sold apples @2.0 dollars each" sentence = sentence.lower() if 'alice' in sentence or 'bob' in sentence: s_list = sentence.split(" ") s_idx = -1 if 'bob' in sentence: s_idx = s_list.index('bob') elif 'alice' in sentence: s_idx = s_list.index('alice') if s_idx > -1: Subject = s_list[s_idx] Action = s_list[s_idx+1] Object = s_list[s_idx+2] #more if/else to validate Object contraints Price = s_list[s_idx+3] #more if/else to extract 2.0 if we get @2.0 print("Subject: {}, Action: {}, Object: {}, Price: {}".format(Subject, Action, Object, Price)) How can I do this better? Possibly using re Continue reading...
