Python string matching - Find if certain number of words in a list of words exist in a sentence in another list

Question

I have a String and a list defined as below

my_string = 'she said he replied'
my_list = ['This is a cool sentence', 'This is another sentence','she said hello he replied goodbye', 'she replied', 'Some more sentences in here', 'et cetera et cetera...']

I am trying to check if at least 3 words in my_string exists in any of the strings in my_list. The approach i'm taking is to split my_string, and use all to do the matching. However, this only works if all the items in my_string exist in a sentence from my_list

if all(word in item for item in my_list for word in my_string.split()):
    print('we happy')

1- How can I make it so the condition is satisfied if at least 3 items of my_string are present in the sentence list?

2- Is it possible to match only the first and last word in my_string in the same order? i.e "she" and "replied" are present in 'she replied' at index 3 of my_list, return True.

Answer 1

Regarding part 1, I think this should work, and I would recommend using a regex and not string.split for finding words.You could also use nltk.word_tokenize if your sentences have complex words and punctuation. They are both slower than string.split, but if you need them, they're useful.

Here's a couple decent posts highlighting the differences (wordpunct-tokenize is basically a word regex in disguise):

nltk wordpunct_tokenize vs word_tokenize

Python re.split() vs nltk word_tokenize and sent_tokenize

import re

num_matches = 3

def get_words(input):
    return re.compile('\w+').findall(input)

my_string = 'she said he replied'
my_list = ['This is a cool sentence', 'This is another sentence','she said hello he replied goodbye', 'she replied', 'Some more sentences in here', 'et cetera et cetera...']

my_string_word_set = set(get_words(my_string))
my_list_words_set = [set(get_words(x)) for x in my_list]

result = [len(my_string_word_set.intersection(x)) >= num_matches for x in my_list_words_set]
print(result)

Results in

[False, False, True, False, False, False]

For part 2, something like this should work, though it's not a super clean solution. If you don't want them just in order, but next to each other, check that the indexes are 1 apart instead.

words = get_words(my_string)
first_and_last = [words[0], words[-1]]
my_list_dicts = []
for sentence in my_list:
    word_dict = {}
    sentence_words = get_words(sentence)
    for i, word in enumerate(sentence_words):
        word_dict[word] = i
    my_list_dicts.append(word_dict)

result2 = []
for word_dict in my_list_dicts:
    if all(k in word_dict for k in first_and_last) and word_dict[first_and_last[0]] < word_dict[first_and_last[1]]:
        result2.append(True)
    else:
        result2.append(False)

print(result2)

Result:

[False, False, True, True, False, False]