Which is the fastest tokenization function in Python 3? - regex

In Python 3, we can use re.compile(), nltk.tokenize() and TextBlob.words() to tokenize a given text. I think there may be other methods too, but I am unaware of them.
Which of these methods or other unmentioned methods tokenizes a given text the fastest?
Thank you in advance.

After calculating the difference in the timestamps between the start and end of each tokenize function, I have come to the following observation:
1) Regex operation is the fastest. The code is as follows:
import re
WORD = re.compile(r'\w+')
def regTokenize(text):
words = WORD.findall(text)
return words
The time taken for tokenizing 100,000 simple, one-lined strings is 0.843757 seconds.
2) NLTK word_tokenize(text) is second. The code is as follows:
import nltk
def nltkTokenize(text):
words = nltk.word_tokenize(text)
return words
The time taken for tokenizing 100,000 simple, one-lined strings is 18.869182 seconds.
3) TextBlob.words is the slowest. The code is as follows:
from textblob import TextBlob as tb
def blobTokenize(text):
words = tb(text).words
return words
The time taken for tokenizing 100,000 simple, one-lined strings is 34.310102 seconds.
Regex operation is extremely fast.
However, NLTK also tokenizes characters, so it returns a bigger list.
TextBlob is almost twice as slow as NLTK, but stores only the words from the
tokenized list.
If anybody else was wondering the same thing, here is the answer.

Related

Improve performance of large document text tokenization through Python + RegEx

I'm currently trying to process a large amount of very big (>10k words) text files. In my data pipeline, I identified the gensim tokenize function as my bottleneck, the relevant part is provided in my MWE below:
import re
import urllib.request
url='https://raw.githubusercontent.com/teropa/nlp/master/resources/corpora/genesis/english-web.txt'
doc=urllib.request.urlopen(url).read().decode('utf-8')
PAT_ALPHABETIC = re.compile('(((?![\d])\w)+)', re.UNICODE)
def tokenize(text):
text.strip()
for match in PAT_ALPHABETIC.finditer(text):
yield match.group()
def preprocessing(doc):
tokens = [token for token in tokenize(doc)]
return tokens
foo=preprocessing(doc)
Calling the preprocessing function for the given example takes roughly 66ms and I would like to improve this number. Is there anything I can still optimize in my code? Or is my hardware (Mid 2010s Consumer Notebook) the issue? I would be interested in the runtimes from people with some more recent hardware as well.
Thank you in advance
You may use
PAT_ALPHABETIC = re.compile(r'[^\W\d]+')
def tokenize(text):
for match in PAT_ALPHABETIC.finditer(text):
yield match.group()
Note:
\w matches letters, digits, underscores, some other connector punctuation and diacritics in Python 3.x by default, you do not need to use re.UNICODE or re.U options
To "exclude" (or "subtract") digit matching from \w, the ((?!\d)\w)+ looks an overkill, all you need to do is to "convert" the \w into an equivalent negated character class, [^\W], and add a \d there: [^\W\d]+.
Note the extraneous text.strip(): Python strings are immutable, if you do not assign a value to a variable, there is no use in text.strip(). Since whitespace in the input string do not interfere with the regex, [^\W\d]+, you may simply strip this text.strip() from your code.

Making a text file which will contain my list items and applying regular expression to it

I am supposed to make a code which will read a text file containing some words with some common linguistic features. Apply some regular expression to all of the words and write one file which will have the changed words.
For now let's say my text file named abcd.txt has these words
king
sing
ping
cling
booked
looked
cooked
packed
My first question starts from here. In my simple text file how to write these words to get the above mentioned results. Shall I write them line-separated or comma separated?
This is the code provided by user palvarez.
import re
with open("new_abcd", "w+") as new, open("abcd") as original:
for word in original:
new_word = re.sub("ing$", "xyz", word)
new.write(new_word)
Can I add something like -
with open("new_abcd", "w+") as file, open("abcd") as original:
for word in original:
new_aword = re.sub("ed$", "abcd", word)
new.write(new_aword)
in the same code file? I want something like -
kabc
sabc
pabc
clabc
bookxyz
lookxyz
cookxyz
packxyz
PS - I don't know whether mentioning this is necessary or not, but I am supposed to do this for a Unicode supported script Devanagari. I didn't use it here in my examples because many of us here can't read the script. Additionally that script uses some diacritics. eg. 'का' has one consonant character 'क' and one vowel symbol 'ा' which together make 'का'. In my regular expression I need to condition the diacritics.
I think the approach you have with one word by line is better since you don't have to trouble yourself with delimiters and striping.
With a file like this:
king
sing
ping
cling
booked
looked
cooked
packed
And a code like this, using re.sub to replace a pattern:
import re
with open("new_abcd.txt", "w") as new, open("abcd.txt") as original:
for word in original:
new_word = re.sub("ing$", "xyz", word)
new_word = re.sub("ed$", "abcd", new_word)
new.write(new_word)
It creates a resulting file:
kxyz
sxyz
pxyz
clxyz
bookabcd
lookabcd
cookabcd
packabcd
I tried out with the diacritic you gave us and it seems to work fine:
print(re.sub("ा$", "ing", "का"))
>>> कing
EDIT: added multiple replacement. You can have your replacements into a list and iterate over it to do re.sub as follows.
import re
# List where first is pattern and second is replacement string
replacements = [("ing$", "xyz"), ("ed$", "abcd")]
with open("new_abcd.txt", "w") as new, open("abcd.txt") as original:
for word in original:
new_word = word
for pattern, replacement in replacements:
new_word = re.sub(pattern, replacement, word)
if new_word != word:
break
new.write(new_word)
This limits one modification per word, only the first that modifies the word is taken.
It is recommended that for starters, utilize the with context manager to open your file, this way you do not need to explicitly close the file once you are done with it.
Another added advantage is then you are able to process the file line by line, this will be very useful if you are working with larger sets of data. Writing them in a single line or csv format will then all depend on the requirement of your output and how you would want to further process them.
As an example, to read from a file and say substitute a substring, you can use re.sub.
import re
with open('abcd.txt', 'r') as f:
for line in f:
#do something here
print(re.sub("ing$",'ring',line.strip()))
>>
kring
sring
pring
clring
Another nifty trick is to manage both the input and output utilizing the same context manager like:
import re
with open('abcd.txt', 'r') as f, open('out_abcd.txt', 'w') as o:
for line in f:
#notice that we add '\n' to write each output to a newline
o.write(re.sub("ing$",'ring',line.strip())+'\n')
This create an output file with your new contents in a very memory efficient way.
If you'd like to write to a csv file or any other specific formats, I highly suggest you spend sometime to understand Python's input and output functions here. If linguistics in text is what you are going for that understand encoding of different languages and further study Python's regex operations.

Removing strings that match multiple regex patterns from pandas series

I have a Pandas dataframe column containing text that needs to be cleaned of strings that match various regex patterns. My current attempt (given below) loops through each pattern, creating a new column containing the match if found, and then loops through the dataframe, splitting the column at the found match. I then drop the unneeded matching column 're_match'.
While this works for my current use case, I can't help but think that there must be a much more efficient, vectorised way of doing this in pandas, without needing to use iterrows() and creating a new column. My question is, is there a more optimal way of removing strings that match multiple regex patterns from a column?
In my current use case the unwanted strings are always at the end of the text block, hence, the use of split(...)[0]. However, it would be great if the unwanted strings could be extracted from any point in the text.
Also, note that combining the regexes into one long single pattern would be unpreferrable, as there are tens of patterns of which will change on a regular basis.
df = pd.read_csv('data.csv', index_col=0)
patterns = [
'( regex1 \d+)',
'((?: regex 2)? \d{1,2} )',
'( \d{0,2}.?\d{0,2}-?\d{1,2}.?\d{0,2}regex3 )',
]
for p in patterns:
df['re_match'] = df['text'].str.extract(
pat=p, flags=re.IGNORECASE, expand=False
)
df['re_match'] = df['re_match'].fillna('xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx')
for index, row in df.iterrows():
df.loc[index, 'text'] = row['text'].split(row['re_match'])[0]
df = df.drop('re_match', axis=1)
Thank you for your help
There is indeed and it is called df.applymap(some_function).
Consider the following example:
from pandas import DataFrame
import pandas as pd, re
df = DataFrame({'key1': ['1000', '2000'], 'key2': ['3000', 'digits(1234)']})
def cleanitup(val):
""" Multiplies digit values """
rx = re.compile(r'^\d+$')
if rx.match(val):
return int(val) * 10
else:
return val
# here is where the magic starts
df.applymap(cleanitup)
Obviously, I made it up, but now in every cell with only digits before, these have been multiplied by 10, every other value has been left untouched.
With this in mind, you can check and rearrange your values if necessary in the function cleanitup().

Applying a regular expression to a text file Python 3

#returns same result i.e. only the first line as many times as 'draws'
infile = open("results_from_url.txt",'r')
file =infile.read() # essential to get correct formatting
for line in islice(file, 0, draws): # allows you to limit number of draws
for line in re.split(r"Wins",file)[1].split('\n'):
mains.append(line[23:38]) # slices first five numbers from line
stars.append(line[39:44]) # slices last two numbers from line
infile.close()
I am trying to use the above code to iterate through a list of numbers to extract the bits of interest. In this attempt to learn how to use regular expressions in Python 3, I am using lottery results opened from the internet. All this does is to read one line and return it as many times as I instruct in the value of 'draws'. Could someone tell me what I have done incorrectly, please. Does re 'terminate' somehow? The strange thing is if I copy the file into a string and run this routine, it works. I am at a loss - problem 'reading' a file or in my use of the regular expression?
I can't tell you why your code doesn't work, because I cannot reproduce the result you're getting. I'm also not sure what the purpose of
for line in islice(file, 0, draws):
is, because you never use the line variable after that, you immediately overwrite it with
for line in re.split(r"Wins",file)[1].split('\n'):
Plus, you could have used file.split('Wins') instead of re.split(r"Wins",file), so you aren't really using regex at all.
Regex is a tool to find data of a certain format. Why do you use it to split the input text, when you could use it to find the data you're looking for?
What is it you're looking for? A sequence of seven numbers, separated by commas. Translated into regex:
(?:\d+,){7}
However, we want to group the first 5 numbers - the "mains" - and the last 2 numbers - the "stars". So we'll add two named capture groups, named "mains" and "stars":
(?P<mains>(?:\d+,){5})(?P<stars>(?:\d+,){2})
This pattern will find all numbers you're looking for.
import re
data= open("infile.txt",'r').read()
mains= []
stars= []
pattern= r'(?P<mains>(?:\d+,){5})(?P<stars>(?:\d+,){2})'
iterator= re.finditer(pattern, data)
for count in range(int(input('Enter number of draws to examine: '))):
try:
match= next(iterator)
except StopIteration:
print('no more matches')
break
mains.append(match.group('mains'))
stars.append(match.group('stars'))
print(mains,stars)
This will print something like ['01,03,31,42,46,'] ['04,11,']. You may want to remove the commas and convert the numbers to ints, but in essence, this is how you would use regex.

Finding if a string matches a pattern

At one point in my app, I need to match some strings against a pattern. Let's say that some of the sample strings look as follows:
Hi there, John.
What a lovely day today!
Lovely sunset today, John, isn't it?
Will you be meeting Linda today, John?
Most (not all) of these strings are from pre-defined patterns as follows:
"Hi there, %s."
"What a lovely day today!"
"Lovely sunset today, %s, isn't it?"
"Will you be meeting %s today, %s?"
This library of patterns is ever-expanding (currently at around 1,500), but is manually maintained. The input strings though (the first group) is largely unpredictable. Though most of them will match one of the patterns, some of them will not.
So, here's my question: Given a string (from the first group) as input, I need to know which of the patterns (known second group) it matched. If nothing matched, it needs to tell me that.
I'm guessing the solution involves building a regex out of the patterns, and iteratively checking which one matched. However, I'm unsure what the code to build those regexes looks like.
Note: The strings I've given here are for illustration purposes. In reality, the strings aren't human generated, but are computer-generated human-friendly strings as shown above from systems I don't control. Since they aren't manually typed in, we don't need to worry about things like typos and other human errors. Just need to find which pattern it matches.
Note 2: I could modify the patterns library to be some other format, if that makes it easier to construct the regexes. The current structure, with the printf style %s, isn't set in stone.
I am looking at this as a parsing problem. The idea is that the parser function takes a string and determines if it is valid or not.
The string is valid if you can find it among the given patterns. That means you need an index of all the patterns. The index must be a full text index. Also it must match according to the word position. eg. it should short circuit if the first word of the input is not found among the first word of the patterns. It should take care of the any match ie %s in the pattern.
One solution is to put the patterns in an in memory database (eg. redis) and do a full text index on it. (this will not match according to word position) but you should be able to narrow down to the correct pattern by splitting the input into words and searching. The searches will be very fast because you have a small in memory database. Also note that you are looking for the closest match. One or more words will not match. The highest number of matches is the pattern you want.
An even better solution is to generate your own index in a dictionary format. Here is an example index for the four patterns you gave as a JavaScript object.
{
"Hi": { "there": {"%s": null}},
"What: {"a": {"lovely": {"day": {"today": null}}}},
"Lovely": {"sunset": {"today": {"%s": {"isnt": {"it": null}}}}},
"Will": {"you": {"be": {"meeting": {"%s": {"today": {"%s": null}}}}}}
}
This index is recursive descending according to the word postion. So search for the first word, if found search for the next within the object returned by the first and so on. Same words at a given level will have only one key. You should also match the any case. This should be blinding fast in memory.
My first thought would be to have the regexp engine take all the trouble of handling this. They're usually optimised to handle large amounts of text so it shouldn't be that much of a performance hassle. It's brute force but the performance seems to be okay. And you could split the input into pieces and have multiple processes handle them. Here's my moderately tested solution (in Python).
import random
import string
import re
def create_random_sentence():
nwords = random.randint(4, 10)
sentence = []
for i in range(nwords):
sentence.append("".join(random.choice(string.lowercase) for x in range(random.randint(3,10))))
ret = " ".join(sentence)
print ret
return ret
patterns = [ r"Hi there, [a-zA-Z]+.",
r"What a lovely day today!",
r"Lovely sunset today, [a-zA-Z]+, isn't it?",
r"Will you be meeting [a-zA-Z]+ today, [a-zA-Z]+\?"]
for i in range(95):
patterns.append(create_random_sentence())
monster_pattern = "|".join("(%s)"%x for x in patterns)
print monster_pattern
print "--------------"
monster_regexp = re.compile(monster_pattern)
inputs = ["Hi there, John.",
"What a lovely day today!",
"Lovely sunset today, John, isn't it?",
"Will you be meeting Linda today, John?",
"Goobledigoock"]*2000
for i in inputs:
ret = monster_regexp.search(i)
if ret:
print ".",
else:
print "x",
I've created a hundred patterns. This is the maximum limit of the python regexp library. 4 of them are your actual examples and the rest are random sentences just to stress performance a little.
Then I combined them into a single regexp with 100 groups. (group1)|(group2)|(group3)|.... I'm guessing you'll have to sanitise the inputs for things that can have meanings in regular expressions (like ? etc.). That's the monster_regexp.
Testing one string against this tests it against 100 patterns in a single shot. There are methods that fetch out the exact group which was matched. I test 10000 strings 80% of which should match and 10% which will not. It short cirtcuits so if there's a success, it will be comparatively quick. Failures will have to run through the whole regexp so it will be slower. You can order things based on the frequency of input to get some more performance out of it.
I ran this on my machine and this is my timing.
python /tmp/scratch.py 0.13s user 0.00s system 97% cpu 0.136 total
which is not too bad.
However, to run a pattern against such a large regexp and fail will take longer so I changed the inputs to have lots of randomly generated strings that won't match and then tried. 10000 strings none of which match the monster_regexp and I got this.
python /tmp/scratch.py 3.76s user 0.01s system 99% cpu 3.779 total
Similar to Noufal's solution, but returns the matched pattern or None.
import re
patterns = [
"Hi there, %s.",
"What a lovely day today!",
"Lovely sunset today, %s, isn't it",
"Will you be meeting %s today, %s?"
]
def make_re_pattern(pattern):
# characters like . ? etc. have special meaning in regular expressions.
# Escape the string to avoid interpretting them as differently.
# The re.escape function escapes even %, so replacing that with XXX to avoid that.
p = re.escape(pattern.replace("%s", "XXX"))
return p.replace("XXX", "\w+")
# Join all the pattens into a single regular expression.
# Each pattern is enclosed in () to remember the match.
# This will help us to find the matched pattern.
rx = re.compile("|".join("(" + make_re_pattern(p) + ")" for p in patterns))
def match(s):
"""Given an input strings, returns the matched pattern or None."""
m = rx.match(s)
if m:
# Find the index of the matching group.
index = (i for i, group in enumerate(m.groups()) if group is not None).next()
return patterns[index]
# Testing with couple of patterns
print match("Hi there, John.")
print match("Will you be meeting Linda today, John?")
Python solution. JS should be similar.
>>> re2.compile('^ABC(.*)E$').search('ABCDE') == None
False
>>> re2.compile('^ABC(.*)E$').search('ABCDDDDDDE') == None
False
>>> re2.compile('^ABC(.*)E$').search('ABX') == None
True
>>>
The trick is to use ^ and $ to bound your pattern and making it a "template". Use (.*) or (.+) or whatever it is that you want to "search" for.
The main bottleneck for you, imho, will be iterating through a list of these patterns. Regex searches are computationally expensive.
If you want a "does any pattern match" result, build a massive OR based regex and let your regex engine handle the 'OR'ing for you.
Also, if you have only prefix patterns, check out the TRIE data structure.
This could be a job for sscanf, there is an implementation in js: http://phpjs.org/functions/sscanf/; the function being copied is this: http://php.net/manual/en/function.sscanf.php.
You should be able to use it without changing the prepared strings much, but I have doubts about the performances.
the problem isn't clear to me. Do you want to take the patterns and build regexes out of it?
Most regex engines have a "quoted string" option. (\Q \E). So you could take the string and make it
^\QHi there,\E(?:.*)\Q.\E$
these will be regexes that match exactly the string you want outside your variables.
if you want to use a single regex to match just a single pattern, you can put them in grouped patterns to find out which one matched, but that will not give you EVERY match, just the first one.
if you use a proper parser (I've used PEG.js), it might be more maintainable though. So that's another option if you think you might get stuck in regex hell