Finding abbreviations in a string in python

Question

let's assume we have a few possible character combinations: ``` mystr = 'NRWTD' my2str = RAWBC' ``` Now all I know is this: ``` vdCacheType = {'AWB' : 'Always WriteBack', 'WB': 'Write Back', 'NR': 'No Read Ahead', 'Ra': 'Read Ahead Adaptive', 'WT': 'Write Through', 'R' : 'Read Ahead Always', 'D': 'Direct IO', 'C': 'Cached' } ``` As you can see the string is a combination of well abbreviated Character/s. My question is how can I take a string, and check if character combinations can be found in the dictionary. I already tried to: ``` for x in vdCacheType: if x in mystr: print x # Here i would save the found abbr. in a list for later use mystr = mystr.strip(x) ``` The problem is that for NRWTD it finds: ``` Found Char: R New String: NRWTD Found Char: WT New String: NRWTD Found Char: NR New String: WTD Found Char: D New String: WT ``` My Intention is to Return: No Read Ahead, Write Through, Direct instead of NRWTD Any Help is appreciated if there is a better approach to this problem I'm…

Accepted Answer

Find the longest possible substrings along the lines of:

```
vdCacheType = {'AWB' : 'Always WriteBack', 'WB': 'Write Back',
               'NR': 'No Read Ahead', 'Ra': 'Read Ahead Adaptive',
               'WT': 'Write Through',  'R' : 'Read Ahead Always',
               'D': 'Direct IO', 'C': 'Cached' }

import re
rx = re.compile('|'.join(sorted(vdCacheType, key=len, reverse=True)))
print ', '.join([vdCacheType[m] for m in rx.findall('NRWTD')])
# No Read Ahead, Write Through, Direct IO
```

And `RAWBC` comes out as: `Read Ahead Always, Always WriteBack, Cached`

Tweak according to case sensitivity and whether the entire text should be a complete an acronym (or series of).

Finding abbreviations in a string in python

Solution

Problem