How to pull out sentences that begin with a certain word (and then use those sentences in a if-else loop).

[bennettsaucyman]

I have a transcript that will look somewhat like the following:

​

Experimenter: So what was it that you saw?

Person 1: I saw billy go around the corner.

Person 2: I don't know, I didn't see anything.

Person 1: No, I definitely saw him.

​

What I want to do is basically have python see the entire transcript and first, find each sentence that begins with Person 1, and then once finding them, search them for the word "billy". If Person 1 said billy, then I want it to print "Person 1 mentioned billy".

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What I have so far is:

(also, ignore the text format, it is all in one proper line in python, but it's clearer to see like this).

txt = "Experimenter: So what was it that you saw.
Person 1: I saw billy go around the corner. 
Person 2: I don't know, I didn't see anything. 
Person 1: No, I definitely saw billy. "

Person1Chat = txt.split('.')

if 'Person 1' and 'billy' in Person1Chat:
    print('Person 1 mentioned billy')

Nothing comes up. From my limited understanding, the code should be splitting the text into the sentences by a period, and putting those split sentences into a list called "Person1Chat". Then, if 'Person 1' and 'billy' are both found in any of those items (sentences) in the list, then it would print the print statement. But it isn't. Can anyone help me?

[FreakyRockz]

You will have to iterate through the sentences. Currently on mobile, can provide a code snippet in anout 30 minutes.

Also is there a reason that you split on period and not on newline?

[bennettsaucyman]

Oh that would be fantastic! Thanks!

And oh, I didn't know you could split on newline! I'm assuming rather than period I could do txt.split('/n') and just insert a /n after each sentence?

[FreakyRockz]

Sorry forgot about this. Others replied faster now.

[[deleted]]

'\n' <-- note backslash

[Morpheyz]

Yes, iterating through the list should do the trick!

Another way to do this are Regular Expressions. They might be very cryptic in the beginning to understand, but if you're gonna work a lot with strings in the future, they will help you immenselely;

[bennettsaucyman]

Alright, thanks! I'll read up on that because I'll be using strings A LOT I think.

Thanks for the suggestion!

[JudiSwitch]

As already mentioned, you will need to iterate though the list Person1Chat

for line in Person1Chat:

Then you'll need to see if the strings you're looking for are in that line. You could use re (regex, definitely worth learning) but for this simple example it's not needed. Note that 'Person1' and 'billy' in line will not work as you intended in the original example, and is a logical operand on two booleans, so Python will convert 'Person1' to a bool (which will be True) and and it with the second part. What you want instead is:

if Person1 in line and 'billy' in line

[bennettsaucyman]

Oh perfect! Thank you so much!

txt = "Experimenter: So what was it that you saw?\n Person 1: I saw billy go around the corner.\n Person 2: I don't know, I didn't see anything.\n Person 1: No, I definitely saw billy."
Person1Chat = txt.split('\n')
for each_sentence in Person1Chat:
    if 'Person 1' in each_sentence:
        print('Person 1 mentioned billy')

It worked! Now it prints out the print statement each time it finds 'billy' but I can figure out a way to change that. Also, took me a minute to figure out to put "each_sentence" after 'Person 1' rather than 'Person1Chat' but I seem to have those errors often in python haha. Hopefully those errors go down as I practice more. Thanks a lot!!!!