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Asked: 2024-09-25T08:59:10+05:30 In:

How can I determine if two strings have identical sets of words in Python, regardless of their order or repetition?

I’m diving into some string manipulation in Python and I’ve hit a snag that I could really use some opinions on. I’m trying to figure out if two strings contain the exact same set of words, but I want to ignore their order and how many times each word appears. Basically, I’m looking for a way to compare the “sets” of words in two different sentences.

Here’s an example to illustrate my dilemma: let’s say I have two strings – “the quick brown fox jumps” and “the fox jumps over the quick brown.” At first glance, they seem a bit different because the second one has more words, but when I break it down, they share the same words: “the,” “quick,” “brown,” “fox,” and “jumps.” I want to be able to say these two strings are equivalent because they contain identical words, regardless of how many times each one appears or their arrangement.

Another example could be “apple banana orange” and “banana apple.” While they’re composed of a different number of words, they ultimately share the same set: just “apple,” “banana,” and “orange.” So, I need to create a way to confirm that these two strings are indeed the same in terms of their word content.

I’ve been toying with different approaches. One thought was to split each string into a list of words and then convert that list into a set, which should help with filtering out duplicates. But then I got caught up thinking about punctuation and spaces. What if there are some sneaky characters in there? Should I clean or preprocess the strings before comparison?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you might approach this! What methods or functions have worked for you in similar situations? Are there any tricks you can think of to handle potential complications like punctuation, just to make sure I’m not missing something obvious? Any advice or snippets of code would be incredibly helpful. Thanks in advance for any insights you can share!

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    2 Answers






    1. String Comparison Help

      String Manipulation in Python

      It sounds like you’re diving deep into string checking! Comparing sets of words from two strings is a cool challenge. Here’s how I’d think about it:

      1. First off, you definitely want to split each string into words. You can use the split() method in Python for that. For example:
        2. str1 = "the quick brown fox jumps"
str2 = "the fox jumps over the quick brown"
words1 = str1.split()
words2 = str2.split()
      2. Next, you’ll want to turn those lists of words into sets. Sets are awesome because they automatically remove duplicates, which is exactly what you need:
        3. set1 = set(words1)
set2 = set(words2)
      3. Now, you can compare the two sets directly using the == operator:
        4. are_equal = set1 == set2
      4. But what about punctuation? Good point! Before splitting the strings, it would be wise to clean them a bit. One way to do this is by using the re (regular expressions) module to remove unwanted characters:
        5. import re

def clean_string(s):
    # Remove punctuation using regex
    return re.sub(r'[^\w\s]', '', s)

cleaned_str1 = clean_string(str1)
cleaned_str2 = clean_string(str2)
      5. Then, proceed with the splitting and set comparison:
        6. words1 = cleaned_str1.split()
words2 = cleaned_str2.split()
set1 = set(words1)
set2 = set(words2)
are_equal = set1 == set2
      6. That should do it! You can check are_equal to see if they have the same words! 🎉

      Hopefully, this helps you get unstuck! Good luck with your coding adventure!



    2. To determine if two strings contain the exact same set of words while ignoring order and frequency, a robust approach involves using Python’s built-in string and collection functionalities. Start by converting each string into a list of words using the `split()` method. To handle possible punctuation and whitespace issues, you can use the `re` module to remove unwanted characters. For example, you might use a regular expression to replace punctuation with empty strings. Once you have clean lists of words, converting these lists into sets will automatically filter out duplicates and allow for easy comparison. Using the equality operator (`==`), you can then check if the sets of both strings are equivalent.

      Here’s a concise example of how you might implement this:

      import re

      def words_equivalent(str1, str2):
          # Clean strings: remove punctuation and convert to lower case
          str1 = re.sub(r'[^\w\s]', '', str1.lower())
          str2 = re.sub(r'[^\w\s]', '', str2.lower())

          # Create sets of words
          set1 = set(str1.split())
          set2 = set(str2.split())

          return set1 == set2

      This code ensures that differences in case, punctuation, and word frequency do not affect the comparison, providing a reliable way to ascertain if the two strings are equivalent in terms of their word content.


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