Distinguishing Words with other Words within It

Question

so I'm trying to be able to detect only "astro" (case insensitive) in a sentence with other words that contain the word "astro" in it. For example:

message = 'Astro, the astronaut, studies astrology.'

if 'astro' in message:
    count = message.count('astro')
    print(count)

The output of this current code would be 3 because there are three words that contain that word in it, but I want the desired output to be 1; the first word. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Thats not python. Please post the code you are using. `SyntaxError: invalid syntax` — Patrick Artner, Feb 20 '19 at 17:39
How much Python do you know? For example, do you know regular expressions? Also correct your code to be runnable Python. — Rory Daulton, Feb 20 '19 at 18:02
It's not something that i'm currently using it's a theoretical situation, the concept that i'm trying to explain is quite clear I believe. — Redicebergz, Feb 20 '19 at 19:00
Possible duplicate of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4173787/string-exact-match — demircioglu, Feb 20 '19 at 19:19
Possible duplicate of [String exact match](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4173787/string-exact-match) — demircioglu, Feb 20 '19 at 19:20

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 20 '19 at 17:42

0

You need to split the message into separate words using split, and then use startswith to check if astro occurs at the start of the word.

answered Feb 20 '19 at 17:42

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 20 '19 at 18:03

You need to massage the data a little bit.

message = "Astro, the astronaut, studies astrology."

First, you need to get rid of everything that's not relevant to individual words.

import string

valid = ' ' + string.ascii_lowercase
message = [char for char in message.lower() if char in valid]
message = ''.join(message)

Now, message looks a little different:

>>> message
'astro the astronaut studies astrology'

Just re-split the message on spaces and count the occurrences!

>>> message.split().count('astro')
1

Distinguishing Words with other Words within It

2 Answers2