The compare_strings function is supposed to compare just the alphanumeric content of two strings, ignoring upper vs lower case a
nd punctuation. But something is not working. Fill in the code to try to find the problems, then fix the problems.
import re
def compare_strings(string1, string2):
#Convert both strings to lowercase
#and remove leading and trailing blanks
string1 = string1.lower().strip()
string2 = string2.lower().strip()
#Ignore punctuation
punctuation = r"[.?!,;:-']"
string1 = re.sub(punctuation, r"", string1)
string2 = re.sub(punctuation, r"", string2)
#DEBUG CODE GOES HERE
print(___)
return string1 == string2
print(compare_strings("Have a Great Day!", "Have a great day?")) # True
print(compare_strings("It's raining again.", "its raining, again")) # True
print(compare_strings("Learn to count: 1, 2, 3.", "Learn to count: one, two, three.")) # False
print(compare_strings("They found some body.", "They found somebody.")) # False
import re
def compare_strings(string1, string2):
#Convert both strings to lowercase
#and remove leading and trailing blanks
string1 = string1.lower().strip()
string2 = string2.lower().strip()
#Ignore punctuation
punctuation = r"[.?!,;:-']"
string1 = re.sub(punctuation, r"", string1)
string2 = re.sub(punctuation, r"", string2)
#DEBUG CODE GOES HERE
print(___)
return string1 == string2
print(compare_strings("Have a Great Day!", "Have a great day?")) # True
print(compare_strings("It's raining again.", "its raining, again")) # True
print(compare_strings("Learn to count: 1, 2, 3.", "Learn to count: one, two, three.")) # False
print(compare_strings("They found some body.", "They found somebody.")) # False
1 answer:
Answer:
The issue within the provided code is located in this part:
Problem:
punctuation = r"[.?!,;:-']"
This results in the following error:
Error:
bad character range
Solution:
The hyphen - needs to be positioned at either the beginning or end of the character list. In this context, the hyphen acts to specify a range of characters. Another option is to escape the hyphen - using a backslash \.
Thus, the corrected statement would be:
punctuation = r"[-.?!,;:']"
Alternatively, you can write it as:
punctuation = r"[.?!,;:'-]"
Additionally, you might modify it like this:
punctuation = r"[.?!,;:\-']"
Explanation:
The complete program is outlined as follows. I have inserted a print statement print('string1:',string1,'\nstring2:',string2) that outputs string1 and string2 , followed by return string1 == string2, which will return either true or false. However, you can omit the print('string1:',string1,'\nstring2:',string2) line and the result will still show true or false
import re #to employ regular expressions
def compare_strings(string1, string2): #defining compare_strings function that takes in two strings and checks them
string1 = string1.lower().strip() # converts string1 to lowercase using lower() method and gets rid of leading and trailing spaces
string2 = string2.lower().strip() # similarly converts string2 to lowercase and removes spaces
punctuation = r"[-.?!,;:']" #regular expression for punctuation marks
string1 = re.sub(punctuation, r"", string1) # applies RE pattern for punctuation in string1
string2 = re.sub(punctuation, r"", string2) # same action as above for string2
print('string1:',string1,'\nstring2:',string2) #displays both strings, separated by a new line
return string1 == string2 #compares the strings and returns true if they match, otherwise false
#function calls to validate the functionality of compare_strings
print(compare_strings("Have a Great Day!","Have a great day?")) # True
print(compare_strings("It's raining again.","its raining, again")) # True
print(compare_strings("Learn to count: 1, 2, 3.","Learn to count: one, two, three.")) # False
print(compare_strings("They found some body.","They found somebody.")) # False
A screenshot of the program and its output is provided.
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