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Searching and Changing Text

If I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it – keep going, keep going come what may.

—Vincent van Gogh

We represent much of the world’s information as text. Think of all the words in all the digital newspapers, e-books, PDF files, blogs, emails, texts, and social media services such as Twitter and Facebook. Given a block of text, how do we search it to see if some desired information is present? How can we change the text to add formatting or corrections or extract information?

Chapter 4, Stringing You Along, covered Python’s functions and methods. This chapter begins with regular expressions and then proceeds to natural language processing (NLP) basics: how to go from a string of ...

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