Capitalize a word based on a matching word in a list

Question

Working through a "Coursera Python" course and I am having a lot of trouble.

The highlight_word function changes the given word in a sentence to its upper-case version. For example, highlight_word("Have a nice day", "nice") returns "Have a NICE day". I want help to rewrite this function in just one line?

def highlight_word(sentence, word):
    return(___)

print(highlight_word("Have a nice day", "nice"))
print(highlight_word("Shhh, don't be so loud!", "loud"))
print(highlight_word("Automating with Python is fun", "fun"))

I think I can do this in a larger statement but does anyone know how to return this correctly in a single line? I am guessing it will involve a list comprehension.

Solution 1

The re.sub works but it was still the incorrect answer and overly complicated - @C. Leconte was correct to use a simple replace.

def highlight_word(sentence, word):
    return(sentence.replace(word,word.upper()))

print(highlight_word("Have a nice day", "nice"))
print(highlight_word("Shhh, don't be so loud!", "loud"))
print(highlight_word("Automating with Python is fun", "fun"))

Thanks

Solution 2

You can try this one, it worked for me !

def highlight_word(sentence, word):
  return sentence[0:sentence.index(word)] + word.upper()+ sentence[sentence.index(word)+len(word):] 

Solution 3

Can be done with a regular expression using re.sub

def highlight_word(sentence, word):
  return re.sub(r'\b' + word + r'\b', word.upper(), sentence)

Solution 4

A partial answer in one line, in the way that @Barmar hinted at:

def highlight_word(sentence, word): return " ".join([x.upper() if x.lower() == word.lower() else x for x in sentence.split()])

Basically - split the sentence into words, and use list comprehension to upper() the matching word. Then use join() to bring the sentence back together.

Edit: sentence.split() will split only on whitespace, so it won't capitalize the second example as "loud!" != "loud". In this case, you could use the regex library to do a substitution.

Yes it works :

Solution 5

Based on what the course teaches, the below expression works for me: def highlight_word(sentence, word): return(sentence[:sentence.find(word)]+word.upper()+sentence[sentence.find(word)+len(wor d):])

In this I have used string slicing only

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Comments

[Barmar]

You can do it with a simple regular expression replacement.

[Barmar]

You can do it with split(), join(), and list comprehension, but it will be long and confusing.

[Barmar]

@AndrejKesely That won't respect word boundaries.

[juanpa.arrivillaga]

For this simple case (ignoring word boundaries) you could probably do return sentence.replace(word, word.upper())

[Barmar]

Probably should use if x.lower() == word, so it will work for things like Python.

[juanpa.arrivillaga]

don't do this: highlight = lambda

[Richard Modad]

I cannot get that second example working - I assume they messed up when they made the question because regex hasn't been covered whatsoever yet. Is there a way to check for .isalpha() or something within this statement to look beyond the ! attached? Could you please show me what the example might be like using regex?

[awasi]

Why don't you use a simple replace() method on the string to change word to word.upper(), is that forbidden for you?

[clover]

I have a question. Does anyone know why my code which is similar to the one above wouldn't work? I thought the if condition has to be at the end of the list comprehension statement. return " ".join([x.upper() for x in sentence.split() if x == word else x])