How to save NLTK concordance results in a list?

Question

I'm using the NLTK to find word in a text. I need to save result of concordance function into a list. The question is already asked here but i cannot see the changes. I try to find the type of returnde value of the function by :

type(text.concordance('myword'))

the result was :

<class 'NoneType'>

Answer 1

By inspecting the source of ConcordanceIndex, we can see that results are printed to stdout. If redirecting stdout to a file is not an option, you have to reimplement the ConcordanceIndex.print_concordance such that it returns the results rather than printing it to stdout.

Code:

def concordance(ci, word, width=75, lines=25):
    """
    Rewrite of nltk.text.ConcordanceIndex.print_concordance that returns results
    instead of printing them. 

    See:
    http://www.nltk.org/api/nltk.html#nltk.text.ConcordanceIndex.print_concordance
    """
    half_width = (width - len(word) - 2) // 2
    context = width // 4 # approx number of words of context

    results = []
    offsets = ci.offsets(word)
    if offsets:
        lines = min(lines, len(offsets))
        for i in offsets:
            if lines <= 0:
                break
            left = (' ' * half_width +
                    ' '.join(ci._tokens[i-context:i]))
            right = ' '.join(ci._tokens[i+1:i+context])
            left = left[-half_width:]
            right = right[:half_width]
            results.append('%s %s %s' % (left, ci._tokens[i], right))
            lines -= 1

    return results

Usage:

from nltk.book import text1
from  nltk.text import ConcordanceIndex

ci = ConcordanceIndex(text1.tokens)
results = concordance(ci, 'circumstances')

print(type(results))
<class 'list'>