Python Replace Single Quotes Except Apostrophes

Question

I am performing the following operations on lists of words. I read lines in from a Project Gutenberg text file, split each line on spaces, perform general punctuation substituti

Answer 1

What you really need to properly replace starting and ending ' is regex. To match them you should use:

• ^' for starting ' (opensingle),
• '$ for ending ' (closesingle).

Unfortunately, replace method does not support regexes, so you should use re.sub instead.

Below you have an example program, printing your desired output (in Python 3):

import re
str = "don't 'George ma'am end.' didn't.' 'Won't"
words = str.split(" ")
for word in words:
    word = re.sub(r"^'", '\n', word)
    word = re.sub(r"'$", '\n', word)
    word = word.replace('.', '\n')
    word = word.replace(',', '\n')
    print(word)