How to remove words starting with lowercase from a sentence using regex

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"I am trying to remove the words starting with lowercase using regular expression but I am not getting the required output."

My input was "apply to this bill and are made a part thereof Illiam B GEISSLER"

import re 
text = "apply to this bill and are made a part thereof Illam B GEISSLER"  
result = re.sub(r"\w[a-z]", "", text)  
print(result)

I got the output as " I B GEISSLER" Required output as " Illiam B GEISSLER"

python-3.x regex
4 Answers

Try finding the pattern \b[a-z]+\s*, and replace with empty string:

text = "apply to this bill and are made a part thereof Illam B GEISSLER"  
result = re.sub(r'\b[a-z]+\s*', "", text).strip()
print(result)

This prints:

Illam B GEISSLER

The idea behind the pattern \b[a-z]+\s* is that it matches only entire words surrounded on both sides by word boundaries. Note that we call strip to remove any remaining whitespace.

One other subtle point is that the pattern removes all whitespace on the RHS of each matching lowercase letter. This is to leave the text readable, should, for example, some matching words lie in between some non matching words:

text = "United States Of a bunch of states called America"  
result = re.sub(r'\b[a-z]+\s*', "", text).strip()
print(result)

This correctly prints:

United States Of America
user_18632290
user_109310550

This expression might also work:

\s*\b[a-z][a-z]*

Demo 1

Test

import re

regex = r"\s*\b[a-z][a-z]*"

test_str = "apply to this bill and are made a part thereof Illam B GEISSLER apply to this bill and are made a part thereof Illam B GEISSLER"

subst = ""

# You can manually specify the number of replacements by changing the 4th argument
result = re.sub(regex, subst, test_str, 0, re.MULTILINE)

if result:
    print (result)

or maybe this one:

([A-Z].*?\b\s*)

Test

import re

regex = r"([A-Z].*?\b\s*)"
test_str = "apply to this bill and are made a part thereof Illam B GEISSLER apply to this bill and are made a part thereof Illam B GEISSLER"
print("".join(re.findall(regex, test_str)))

Output

Illam B GEISSLER Illam B GEISSLER

Demo 2

user_65533280

Try this,

import re
text = "apply to this bill and are made a part thereof Illam B GEISSLER"
result = re.sub(r"(\b[a-z]+)", '', text).strip()
print(result)

Output

Illam B GEISSLER
user_49491650
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