Natural Language Processing in Action

Appendix B. Playful Python and regular expressions

To get the most out of this book, you’ll want to get comfortable with Python. You’ll want to be so comfortable that you get playful. When things don’t work, you’ll need to be able to play around and explore to find a way to make Python do what you want.

And even when your code works, playing around may help you uncover cool new ways of doing things or hidden monsters lurking in your code. Hidden errors and edge cases are very common in natural language processing, because there are so many different ways to say things in a language like English.

To get playful, just experiment with Python code, like children do. If you copy and paste code, change it. Try to break it and then fix it. Pull it apart ...