How can I remove numbers, and words with length below 2, from a sentence?

Question

I am trying to remove words that have length below 2 and any word that is numbers. For example

 s = " This is a test 1212 test2"

Output desired is

" This is test test2"

I tried \w{2,} this removes all the word whose length is below 2. When I added \D+ this removes all numbers when I didn't want to get rid of 2 from test2.

Answer 1

You may use:

s = re.sub(r'\b(?:\d+|\w)\b\s*', '', s)

RegEx Demo

Pattern Details:

• \b: Match word boundary
• (?:\d+|\w): Match a single word character or 1+ digits
• \b: Match word boundary
• \s*: Match 0 or more whitespaces

Answer 2

You can make use of work boundaries '\b' and remove anything that is 1 character long inside boundaries: number or letter, doesn't matter. Also remove anything between boundaries that is just numbers:

import re

s = " This is a test 1212 test2"

print( re.sub(r"\b([^ ]|\d+)\b","",s))

Output:

 This is  test  test2

Explanation:

\b(           word boundary followed by a group
   [^ ]           anything that is not a space (1 character) 
       |              or
        \d+       any amount of numbers
)             followed by another boundary

is replaced by re.sub(pattern, replaceBy, source) with "".