Enumerate sentences in python

Question

I have a tuple of strings that consists of two sentences

a = ('What', 'happened', 'then', '?', 'What', 'would', 'you', 'like', 'to', 'drink','?')

I tried this

for i,j in enumerate(a):
print i,j

which gives

0 What
1 happened
2 then
3 ?
4 What
5 would
6 you
7 like
8 to
9 drink
10 ?

whereas what I need is this

0 What
1 happened
2 then
3 ?
0 What
1 would
2 you
3 like
4 to
5 drink
6?

How would I know were the first line finishes in the tuple ? Is question mark a separator ? — Tanveer Alam, Jul 03 '15 at 06:22
You have a tuple of strings in your example. This is different from what you state in the description, "A string of two sentences" — user3636636, Jul 03 '15 at 06:25
@ Tanveer Alam: yes, that's correct, '?' is a separator but it can also be any other punctuation mark. — user3635159, Jul 03 '15 at 06:26

jeromej · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-03T06:29:14.927

7

The simplest would be to manually increase i instead of relying on enumerate and reset the counter on the character ?, . or !.

i = 0
for word in sentence:
    print i, word

    if word in ('.', '?', '!'):
        i = 0
    else:
        i += 1

edited Jul 03 '15 at 06:29

answered Jul 03 '15 at 06:23

jeromej

10,508
2
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This is a nice and simple and yet very effective solution! I like other suggestions as well but I agree with @UlfR that this one is the least complicated. – user3635159 Jul 03 '15 at 07:02
any idea how this would look like in a `shell` script or `awk`? – user3635159 Jul 03 '15 at 07:22

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 03 '15 at 06:41

Overly complicated maybe. The solution of @JeromeJ is cleaner I think. But:

a=('What', 'happened', 'then', '?', 'What', 'would', 'you', 'like', 'to', 'drink','?')
start = 0
try: end = a.index('?', start)+1
except: end = 0

while a[start:end]:
    for i,j in enumerate(a[start:end]):
        print i,j
    start = end
    try: end = a.index('?', start)+1
    except: end = 0

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 03 '15 at 06:50

1

One more:

from itertools import chain

for n,c in chain(enumerate(a[:a.index('?')+1]), enumerate(a[a.index('?')+1:])):
    print "{} {}".format(n,i)
   ....:
0 What
1 happened
2 then
3 ?
0 What
1 would
2 you
3 like
4 to
5 drink
6 ?

answered Jul 03 '15 at 06:50

salparadise

5,699
1
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Enumerate sentences in python

3 Answers3