get indices of original text from nltk word_tokenize

Question

I am tokenizing a text using nltk.word_tokenize and I would like to also get the index in the original raw text to the first character of every token, i.e.

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Answer 1

I think you are looking for is the span_tokenize() method. Apparently this is not supported by the default tokenizer. Here is a code example with another tokenizer.

from nltk.tokenize import WhitespaceTokenizer
s = "Good muffins cost $3.88\nin New York."
span_generator = WhitespaceTokenizer().span_tokenize(s)
spans = [span for span in span_generator]
print(spans)

Which gives:

[(0, 4), (5, 12), (13, 17), (18, 23), (24, 26), (27, 30), (31, 36)]

just getting the offsets:

offsets = [span[0] for span in spans]
[0, 5, 13, 18, 24, 27, 31]

For further information (on the different tokenizers available) see the tokenize api docs