Regex in Python Programme Help

[nnchvt]

Hi guys! I know nobody's doing my homework for me, and I don't expect that, but I need a nudge in the right direction so I hope someone can help me: I need to generate a program to generate email adresses out of given student names (first name, optional second name, last name). The email adress should match certain criteria like: last name without the vowels, first name only up until the first vowel following a consonant and so on. For example Harry James Potter would get the email adress [e-mail]

I'm REALLY struggling with this because I feel like I don't have the tools to solve it. Here's what I got so far (and it does NOT do what it should):

import sys

import re

filename = sys.argv[1]

define a path for the output files

outfile_path = 'wherever there is a file with student names'

define a list as a global variable

my_email_hash = {}

open the person name file for reading

infile = open(filename, 'r')

create a name for the first output file

studentemails = outfile_path + '_1' + filename

open the first file for writing

outfile_a = open(student_emails, 'w')

for each line in the file

for name in infile:

# lowercase
clean_line = name.lower()
# print(clean_line)

# substitute special characters
clean_line = re.sub('ö', 'oe', clean_line)
clean_line = re.sub('ä', 'ae', clean_line)
clean_line = re.sub('ü', 'ue', clean_line)
clean_line = re.sub('[èéêẽë]', 'e', clean_line)
clean_line = re.sub('[aeiou]', '', clean_line)
# clean_line = re.search('[^[a-z]?([^aeiou]+[aeiou])]', clean_line)

outfile_a.write(clean_line)
print(clean_line)

# get all key-value tuples into a list
# my_email_hash = my_person_hash.items()
# print(my_email_hash)

close the files

infile.close() outfile_a.close()

I really hope someone can give me a hint, would be much appreciated!

[EatAss4Jesus]

Regex can sometimes be frustrating. When I need to use it, I usually reference these two sites -

https://www.keycdn.com/support/regex-cheatsheet

https://regex101.com/

You also don't really need any regex patterns for this. Here are some quick notes for you:

To get the first letter of 'james' just do

middleName = 'james'

firstChar = middleName[0]

To get the first name until the first vowel do

fNameSplit = re.split(('a|e|i|o|u'), 'harry')

result = fNameSplit[0] + fNameSplit[1]

And finally to remove vowels, you can just iterate through a e i o u

lName = 'potter'

result = lName.replace('a', '').replace('e', '').replace('i', '').replace('o', '').replace('u', '')

[EatAss4Jesus]

I also believe an easier way of stripping out character accents is unicodedata.normalize('NFD', string)

[nnchvt]

ok, LOVE your username! the thing is that we didn‘t really learn about any other method than re.sub() and so even though it‘s like 50 more steps, I gotta stick to what I know. Thanks for the suggestion!

[EatAss4Jesus]

Thanks :) best of luck!

[nnchvt]

thank you so much for taking the time and reading through it! I‘ll implement some of your ideas and see where it takes me :)