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Thabang Richard Katlholo
3,761 Pointsword length challenge
im stuck help me out
import re
def find_words(count, string):
return re.findall(r'\w', string)
# EXAMPLE:
# >>> find_words(4, "dog, cat, baby, balloon, me")
# ['baby', 'balloon']
4 Answers
Alex Golden
4,098 PointsHey! this took me about 20 friggin minutes of head-banging to figure out:
def find_words(c, string): return re.findall(r'\w+' * c, string)
I've seen a LOT of answers that involve crazy amounts of curly braces, which we haven't learned yet in this course. helpful?
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,457 PointsYou are close. What you have now finds all of the strings that contain a single word-character.
You need to modify the matching pattern to find count number of \w characters or more. For example, to find 3 or more characters you could use.
re.findall(r'\w{3,}', string)
How would find "count or more" characters?
Post back if you need more help. Good Luck!!
Thabang Richard Katlholo
3,761 Pointsstill can't get it, here is the question Create a function named find_words that takes a count and a string. Return a list of all of the words in the string that are count word characters long or longer.
Alex Golden
4,098 PointsI'm confused by the *3 on this. We need to be able to search for the length supplied to the function. Would *c work as well?
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,457 PointsSorry, fixed example code replacing 3 with variable c
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,457 PointsChris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,457 PointsRegex patterns provide many ways to get the correct result. I had not seen your solution to this code challenge before. Nicely done!
Your pattern may be a bit confusing to some as reads as “one or more word characters followed by one or more word characters followed by one or more word characters“. This still works due to pattern backtracking but it is less efficient.
A better presentation might be
re.findall(r'\w'*c + '+', string)This pattern reads as “one word character followed by one word character followed by one or more word characters“.
Edit: replaced 3 with
c