Remove substring from string if substring is contained in a list

Question

Problem: I have a string that has "tags" from a list called "listOfTags". If the string contains one of these "tags" from the list I want to be able to remove these "tags" from the string.

What I tried: I first tried traversing through "listOfTags" and appending each "tag" to an empty string variable called x. Then, I tried to remove the "tags" from another string variable called y by using the string.replace method.I then realized that this method would only return what I wanted if the "tags" appeared in the order that they were appended in the variable x.

The algorithm I created is as follows:

if a string contains as a sub-string any strings specified in a particular list: remove the substring from the string

An example of the problem:

listOFTags = ["#tag", "#bold", "#merge"] 

string = "#tag #bold bob #merge" 

#execute algorithm here

How do I get a string returned that has the text "bob"?

What I want returned:

new_string = "bob"

Possible duplicate of Python removing substring

DollarAkshay
– DollarAkshay

2019-07-25 01:07:07 +00:00
Commented Jul 25, 2019 at 1:07 — DollarAkshay
– DollarAkshay, Commented Jul 25, 2019 at 1:07

Gravity Mass · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-25 01:09:58Z

3

You can use replace:

listOFTags = ["#tag", "#bold", "#merge"]

string = "#tag #bold bob #merge"

for tags in listOFTags:
    string = string.replace(tags, "")

print(string)

answered Jul 25, 2019 at 1:09

Gravity Mass

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Comments

GZ0 · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-25 01:42:23Z

1

If there are tens of tags and each string to process contains tens of words, it would be more efficient to use regular expressions for this task.

import re
p = re.compile('|'.join(listOFTags))  # p can be reused across different input strings
new_string = p.sub("", string).strip()

This solution works if the tags do not contain any characters that have special meanings in regular expressions.

edited Jul 25, 2019 at 1:42

answered Jul 25, 2019 at 1:36

GZ0

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