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Python - Injecting html tags into strings based on regex match

I wrote a script in Python for custom HTML page that finds a word within a string/line and highlights just that word with use of following tags where instance is the word that is searched for.
<b><font color=\"red\">"+instance+"</font></b>
With the following result:
I need to find a word (case insensitive) let's say "port" within a string that can be port, Port, SUPPORT, Support, support etc, which is easy enough.
pattern = re.compile(word, re.IGNORECASE)
find_all_instances = pattern.findall(string_to_search)
However my strings often contain 2 or more instances in single line, and I need to append
<b><font color=\"red\">"+instance+"</font></b> to each of those instances, without changing cases.
Problem with my approach, is that I am attempting to itterate over each of instances found with findall (exact match),
while multiple same matches can also be found within the string.
for instance in find_all_instances:
second_pattern = re.compile(instance)
string_to_search = second_pattern.sub("<b><font color=\"red\">"+instance+"</font></b>", string_to_search)
This results in following:
<b><font color="red"><b><font color="red"><b><font color="red">Http</font></b></font></b></font></b></font>
when I need
<b><font color="red">Http</font></b>
I was thinking, I would be able to avoid this if I was able to find out exact part of the string that the pattern.sub substitutes at the moment of doing it,
however I was not able to find any examples of that kind of usage, which leads me to believe that I am doing something very wrong.
If anyone have a way I could use to insert <b><font color="red">instance</font></b> without replacing instance for all matches(case insensitive), then I would be grateful.

Maybe I'm misinterpretting your question, but wouldn't re.sub be the best option?
Example: https://repl.it/DExs

Okay so two ways I did quickly! The second loop is definitely the way to go. It uses re.sub (as someone else commented too). It replaces with the lowercase search term bear in mind.
import re
FILE = open("testing.txt","r")
word="port"
#THIS LOOP IS CASE SENSITIVE
for line in FILE:
newline=line.replace(word,"<b><font color=\"red\">"+word+"</font></b>")
print newline
#THIS LOOP IS INCASESENSITIVE
for line in FILE:
pattern=re.compile(word,re.IGNORECASE)
newline = pattern.sub("<b><font color=\"red\">"+word+"</font></b>",line)
print newline

How to perform a tag-agnostic text string search in an html file?

I'm using LanguageTool (LT) with the --xmlfilter option enabled to spell-check HTML files. This forces LanguageTool to strip all tags before running the spell check.
This also means that all reported character positions are off because LT doesn't "see" the tags.
For example, if I check the following HTML fragment:
<p>This is kin<b>d</b> o<i>f</i> a <b>stupid</b> question.</p>
LanguageTool will treat it as a plain text sentence:
This is kind of a stupid question.
and returns the following message:
<error category="Grammar" categoryid="GRAMMAR" context=" This is kind of a stupid question. " contextoffset="24" errorlength="9" fromx="8" fromy="8" locqualityissuetype="grammar" msg="Don't include 'a' after a classification term. Use simply 'kind of'." offset="24" replacements="kind of" ruleId="KIND_OF_A" shortmsg="Grammatical problem" subId="1" tox="17" toy="8"/>
(In this particular example, LT has flagged "kind of a.")
Since the search string might be wrapped in tags and might occur multiple times I can't do a simple index search.
What would be the most efficient Python solution to reliably locate any given text string in an HTML file? (LT returns an approximate character position, which might be off by 10-30% depending on the number of tags, as well as the words before and after the flagged word(s).)
I.e. I'd need to do a search that ignores all tags, but includes them in the character position count.
In this particular example, I'd have to locate "kind of a" and find the location of the letter k in:
kin<b>d</b> o<i>f</i>a

This may not be the speediest way to go, but pyparsing will recognize HTML tags in most forms. The following code inverts the typical scan, creating a scanner that will match any single character, and then configuring the scanner to skip over HTML open and close tags, and also common HTML '&xxx;' entities. pyparsing's scanString method returns a generator that yields the matched tokens, the starting, and the ending location of each match, so it is easy to build a list that maps every character outside of a tag to its original location. From there, the rest is pretty much just ''.join and indexing into the list. See the comments in the code below:
test = "<p>This is kin<b>d</b> o<i>f</i> a <b>stupid</b> question.</p>"
from pyparsing import Word, printables, anyOpenTag, anyCloseTag, commonHTMLEntity
non_tag_text = Word(printables+' ', exact=1).leaveWhitespace()
non_tag_text.ignore(anyOpenTag | anyCloseTag | commonHTMLEntity)
# use scanString to get all characters outside of tags, and build list
# of (char,loc) tuples
char_locs = [(t[0], loc) for t,loc,endloc in non_tag_text.scanString(test)]
# imagine a world without HTML tags...
untagged = ''.join(ch for ch, loc in char_locs)
# look for our string in the untagged text, then index into the char,loc list
# to find the original location
search_str = 'kind of a'
orig_loc = char_locs[untagged.find(search_str)][1]
# print the test string, and mark where we found the matching text
print(test)
print(' '*orig_loc + '^')
"""
Should look like this:
<p>This is kin<b>d</b> o<i>f</i> a <b>stupid</b> question.</p>
^
"""

The --xmlfilter option is deprecated because of issues like this. The proper solution is to remove the tags yourself but keep the positions so you have a mapping to correct the results that come back from LT. When using LT from Java, this is supported by AnnotatedText, but the algorithm should be simple enough to port it. (full disclosure: I'm the maintainer of LT)

Replacing strings in a text and ignoring certain parts

I found many programs online to replace text in a string or file with words prescribed in a dictionary. For example, https://www.daniweb.com/programming/software-development/code/216636/multiple-word-replace-in-text-python
But I was wondering how to get the program to ignore certain parts of the text. For instance, I would like it to ignore parts that are ensconced within say % signs (%Please ignore this%). Better still, how do I get it to ignore the text within but remove the % sign at the end of the run.
Thank you.

This could very easily be done with regular expressions, although they may not be supported by any online programs you find. You will probably need to write something yourself and then use regex as your dict's search key's.
Good place to start playing around with regex is: http://regexr.com

Well in the replacing dictionary just have any word you want to be ignored such as teh be replaced with the but %teh% be replaced with teh. For the program in the link you could have
wordDic = {
'booster': 'rooster',
'%booster%': 'booster'
}

Python: Regex a dictionary using user input wildcards

I would like to be able to search a dictionary in Python using user input wildcards.
I have found this:
import fnmatch
lst = ['this','is','just','a','test', 'thing']
filtered = fnmatch.filter(lst, 'th*')
This matches this and thing. Now if I try to input a whole file and search through
with open('testfilefolder/wssnt10.txt') as f:
file_contents = f.read().lower()
filtered = fnmatch.filter(file_contents, 'th*')
this doesn't match anything. The difference is that in the file that I am reading from I is a text file (Shakespeare play) so I have spaces and it is not a list. I can match things such as a single letter, so if I just have 't' then I get a bunch of t's. So this tells me that I am matching single letters - I however am wanting to match whole words - but even more, to preserve the wildcard structure.
Since what I would like to happen is that a user enters in text (including what will be a wildcard) that I can substitute it in to the place that 'th*' is. The wild card would do what it should still. That leads to the question, can I just stick in a variable holding the search text in for 'th*'? After some investigation I am wondering if I am somehow supposed to translate the 'th*' for example and have found something such as:
regex = fnmatch.translate('th*')
print(regex)
which outputs th.*\Z(?ms)
Is this the right way to go about doing this? I don't know if it is needed.
What would be the best way in going about "passing in regex formulas" as well as perhaps an idea of what I have wrong in the code as it is not operating on the string of incoming text in the second set of code as it does (correctly) in the first.

If the problem is just that you "have spaces and it is not a list," why not make it into a list?
with open('testfilefolder/wssnt10.txt') as f:
file_contents = f.read().lower().split(' ') # split line on spaces to make a list
filtered = fnmatch.filter(file_contents, 'th*')

Spell check program in python

Exercise problem: "given a word list and a text file, spell check the
contents of the text file and print all (unique) words which aren't
found in the word list."
I didn't get solutions to the problem so can somebody tell me how I went and what the correct answer should be?:
As a disclaimer none of this parses in my python console...
My attempt:
a=list[....,.....,....,whatever goes here,...]
data = open(C:\Documents and Settings\bhaa\Desktop\blablabla.txt).read()
#I'm aware that something is wrong here since I get an error when I use it.....when I just write blablabla.txt it says that it can't find the thing. Is this function only gonna work if I'm working off the online IVLE program where all those files are automatically linked to the console or how would I do things from python without logging into the online IVLE?
for words in data:
for words not in a
print words
wrong = words not in a
right = words in a
print="wrong spelling:" + "properly splled words:" + right
oh yeh...I'm very sure I've indented everything correctly but I don't know how to format my question here so that it doesn't come out as a block like it has. sorry.
What do you think?

There are many things wrong with this code - I'm going to mark some of them below, but I strongly recommend that you read up on Python control flow constructs, comparison operators, and built-in data types.
a=list[....,.....,....,whatever goes here,...]
data = open(C:\Documents and Settings\bhaa\Desktop\blablabla.txt).read()
# The filename needs to be a string value - put "C:\..." in quotes!
for words in data:
# data is a string - iterating over it will give you one letter
# per iteration, not one word
for words not in a
# aside from syntax (remember the colons!), remember what for means - it
# executes its body once for every item in a collection. "not in a" is not a
# collection of any kind!
print words
wrong = words not in a
# this does not say what you think it says - "not in" is an operator which
# takes an arbitrary value on the left, and some collection on the right,
# and returns a single boolean value
right = words in a
# same as the previous line
print="wrong spelling:" + "properly splled words:" + right

I don't know what you are trying to iterate over, but why don't you just first iterate over your words (which are in the variable a I guess?) and then for every word in a you iterate over the wordlist and check whether or not that word is in the wordslist.
I won't paste code since it seems like homework to me (if so, please add the homework tag).
Btw the first argument to open() should be a string.

It's simple really. Turn both lists into sets then take the difference. Should take like 10 lines of code. You just have to figure out the syntax on your own ;) You aren't going to learn anything by having us write it for you.