How to remove list of words from a list of strings

Question

Sorry if the question is bit confusing. This is similar to this question

I think this the above question is close to what I want, but in Clojure.

There is a

Answer 1

Here is my stab at it. This uses regular expressions.

import re
pattern = re.compile("(of|the|in|for|at)\W", re.I)
phrases = ['of New York', 'of the New York']
map(lambda phrase: pattern.sub("", phrase),  phrases) # ['New York', 'New York']

Sans lambda:

[pattern.sub("", phrase) for phrase in phrases]

Update

Fix for the bug pointed out by gnibbler (thanks!):

pattern = re.compile("\\b(of|the|in|for|at)\\W", re.I)
phrases = ['of New York', 'of the New York', 'Spain has rain']
[pattern.sub("", phrase) for phrase in phrases] # ['New York', 'New York', 'Spain has rain']

@prabhu: the above change avoids snipping off the trailing "in" from "Spain". To verify run both versions of the regular expressions against the phrase "Spain has rain".