Extracting whole words

by

If you restrict yourself to ASCII letters, then use (with the re.I option set)

\b[a-z]+\b

\b is a word boundary anchor, matching only at the start and end of alphanumeric “words”. So \b[a-z]+\b matches pie, but not pie21 or 21pie.

To also allow other non-ASCII letters, you can use something like this:

\b[^\W\d_]+\b

which also allows accented characters etc. You may need to set the re.UNICODE option, especially when using Python 2, in order to allow the \w shorthand to match non-ASCII letters.

[^\W\d_] as a negated character class allows any alphanumeric character except for digits and underscore.

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