Python3 replace tags based on condition of the type of tag

Question

I want all the tags in a text that look like

<Bus:1234|Bob Alice>

or

<Car:5678|Nelson Mandela>

to be replaced with

<a my-inner-type="CR:1234">Bob Alice</a>

and

<a my-inner-type="BS:5678">Nelson Mandela</a>

respectively. So basically, depending on the Type whether

TypeA

or

TypeB

, I want to replace the text accordingly in a text string using Python3 and regex.

I tried doing the following in python but not sure if that's the right approach to go forward:

import re

def my_replace():

    re.sub(r'\<(.*?)\>', replace_function, data)

With the above, I am trying to do a regex of the

< >

tag and every tag I find, I pass that to a function called

replace_function

to split the text between the tag and determine if it is a

TypeA

or a

TypeB

and compute the stuff and return the replacement tag dynamically. I am not even sure if this is even possible using the

re.sub

but any leads would help. Thank you.

Examples:

<Car:1234|Bob Alice>
becomes
<a my-inner-type="CR:1234">Bob Alice</a>

<Bus:5678|Nelson Mandela>
becomes
<a my-inner-type="BS:5678">Nelson Mandela</a>

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Answer 1

This is perfectly possible with re.sub, and you're on the right track with using a replacement function (which is designed to allow dynamic replacements). See below for an example that works with the examples you give - probably have to modify to suit your use case depending on what other data is present in the text (ie. other tags you need to ignore)

import re

def replace_function(m):
    # note: to not modify the text (ie if you want to ignore this tag),
    # simply do (return the entire original match):
    # return m.group(0)

    inner = m.group(1)
    t, name = inner.split('|')

    # process type here - the following will only work if types always follow
    # the pattern given in the question
    typename = t[4:]
    # EDIT: based on your edits, you will probably need more processing here
    # eg:
    if t.split(':')[0] == 'Car':
        typename = 'CR'
    # etc

    return '<a my-inner-type="{}">{}</a>'.format(typename, name)

def my_replace(data):
    return re.sub(r'\<(.*?)\>', replace_function, data)



# let's just test it
data = 'I want all the tags in a text that look like <TypeA:1234|Bob Alice> or <TypeB:5678|Nelson Mandela> to be replaced with'
print(my_replace(data))

Warning: if this text is actually full html, regex matching will not be reliable - use an html processor like beautifulsoup. ;)

Python3 replace tags based on condition of the type of tag

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