Python: find a series of Chinese characters within a string and apply a function

Question

I\'ve got a series of text that is mostly English, but contains some phrases with Chinese characters. Here\'s two examples:

s1 = \"You say: 你好. I say: 再見\"
s         


        

Answer 1

You can't get the indexes using re.findall(). You could use re.finditer() instead, and refer to m.group(), m.start() and m.end().

However, for your particular case, it seems more practical to call a function using re.sub().

If repl is a function, it is called for every non-overlapping occurrence of pattern. The function takes a single match object argument, and returns the replacement string

Code:

import re

s = "You say: 你好. I say: 再見. 答案, my friend, 在風在吹"
utf_line = s.decode('utf-8')

dict = {"你好" : "hello",
        "再見" : "goodbye",
        "答案" : "The answer",
        "在風在吹" : "is blowing in the wind",
       }

def translate(m):
    block = m.group().encode('utf-8')
    # Do your translation here

    # this is just an example
    if block in dict:
        return dict[ block ]
    else:
        return "{unknown}"


utf_translated = re.sub(ur'[\u4e00-\u9fff]+', translate, utf_line, re.UNICODE)

print utf_translated.encode('utf-8')

Output:

You say: hello. I say: goodbye. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind

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