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Python Regular Expressions in Python Introduction to Regular Expressions Word Length

Posted by Rohit Gopalan
Rohit Gopalan
81,945 Points

Finding all the words with length at least count word characters in a string

I used the following expression re.findall(r'\w{count,}',string) to find all the words with length at least count characters and was unable to get the code working. Can someone please suggest how I can overcome this issue?

word_length.py 
import re

# EXAMPLE:
# >>> find_words(4, "dog, cat, baby, balloon, me")
# ['baby', 'balloon']
def find_words(count,string):
  return re.findall(r'\w{count,}',string)

2 Answers

Chase Marchione
Chase Marchione
155,055 Points
Chase Marchione
Chase Marchione
155,055 Points

Hi Rohit,

You might try converting the count variable to a string in the middle of the argument (and using the concatenation operator so that it works syntactically... in other words, so that your variable isn't interpreted as literal characters in the regular expression):

  return re.findall(r'\w{' + str(count) + ',}',string)

Hope this helps!

Michael Vandenburg
Michael Vandenburg
6,952 Points
Michael Vandenburg
Michael Vandenburg
6,952 Points

The pink in the challenges text editor is a clue that it's reading the word "count" as part of the string being used as the regular expression. For the Python interpreter to see the variable and substitute its value when executing the code, it needs to be outside the quotation marks.

I don't think .format() works because of the r (at least I couldn't get it to work), but you can still concatenate the strings you need to build the complete expression.