Extracting whole words

Question

I have a large set of real-world text that I need to pull words out of to input into a spell checker. I\'d like to extract as many meaningful words as possible with

Answer 1

Are you familiar with word boundaries? (\b). You can extract word's using the \b around the sequence and matching the alphabet within:

\b([a-zA-Z]+)\b

For instance, this will grab whole words but stop at tokens such as hyphens, periods, semi-colons, etc.

You can the \b sequence, and others, over at the python manual

EDIT Also, if you're looking to about a number following or preceding the match, you can use a negative look-ahead/behind:

(?!\d)   # negative look-ahead for numbers
(?