SpongeBob SquarePants Problem¶

Here are some quotes from SpongeBob SquarePants.

quotes = [
    "A 5 letter word for happiness... MONEY.",
    "I might as well sleep for 100 years or so.",
    "Hey Patrick, I thought of something funnier than 24... 25!",
    "I will have you know that I stubbed my toe last week and only cried for 20 minutes.",
    "Sandy: Don’t you have to be stupid somewhere else? Patrick: Not until 4."
]

For each quote, extract everything before the first occurrence of a digit.

Expected result

newquotes = [
    'A ', 
    'I might as well sleep for ', 
    'Hey Patrick, I thought of something funnier than ', 
    'I will have you know that I stubbed my toe last week and only cried for ', 
    'Sandy: Don’t you have to be stupid somewhere else? Patrick: Not until '
]

Regex Functions

Function	Description	Return Value
`re.findall(pattern, string, flags=0)`	Find all non-overlapping occurrences of pattern in string	list of strings, or list of tuples if > 1 capture group
`re.finditer(pattern, string, flags=0)`	Find all non-overlapping occurrences of pattern in string	iterator yielding match objects
`re.search(pattern, string, flags=0)`	Find first occurrence of pattern in string	match object or `None`
`re.split(pattern, string, maxsplit=0, flags=0)`	Split string by occurrences of pattern	list of strings
`re.sub(pattern, repl, string, count=0, flags=0)`	Replace pattern with repl	new string with the replacement(s)

Regex Patterns

Pattern	Description
`[abc]`	a or b or c
`[^abc]`	not (a or b or c)
`[a-z]`	a or b ... or y or z
`[1-9]`	1 or 2 ... or 8 or 9
`\d`	digits `[0-9]`
`\D`	non-digits `[^0-9]`
`\s`	whitespace `[ \t\n\r\f\v]`
`\S`	non-whitespace `[^ \t\n\r\f\v]`
`\w`	alphanumeric `[a-zA-Z0-9_]`
`\W`	non-alphanumeric `[^a-zA-Z0-9_]`
`.`	any character
`x*`	zero or more repetitions of x
`x+`	one or more repetitions of x
`x?`	zero or one repetitions of x
`{m}`	m repetitions
`{m,n}`	m to n repetitions
`{m,n}`	m to n repetitions
`\\`, `\.`, `\*`	backslash, period, asterisk
`\b`	word boundary
`^hello`	starts with hello
`bye$`	ends with bye
`(...)`	capture group
`(po\|go)`	po or go

Try with Google Colab