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pythonsplittext-mininguppercase

Split a string at uppercase letters, but only if a lowercase letter follows in Python

I am using pdfminer.six in Python to extract long text data. Unfortunately, the Miner does not always work very well, especially with paragraphs and text wrapping. For example I got the following output:

"2018Annual ReportInvesting for Growth and Market LeadershipOur CEO will provide you with all further details below."

--> "2018 Annual Report Investing for Growth and Market Leadership Our CEO will provide you with all further details below."

Now I would like to insert a space whenever a lowercase letter is followed by a capital letter and then a smaller letter (and for numbers). So that in the end "2018Annual" becomes "2018 Annual" and "ReportInvesting" becomes "Report Investing", but "...CEO..." remains "...CEO...".

I only found solutions to Split a string at uppercase letters and https://stackoverflow.com/a/3216204/14635557 but could not rewrite it. Unfortunately I am totally new in the field of Python.

Solution

  • We can try using re.sub here for a regex approach:

    inp = "2018Annual ReportInvesting for Growth and Market LeadershipOur CEO will provide you with all further details below."
inp = re.sub(r'(?<![A-Z\W])(?=[A-Z])', ' ', inp)
print(inp)

    This prints:

    2018 Annual Report Investing for Growth and Market Leadership Our CEO will provide you with all further details below.

    The regex used here says to insert a space at any point for which:

    (?<![A-Z\W])  what precedes is a word character EXCEPT
              for capital letters
(?=[A-Z])     and what follows is a capital letter