Speed up millions of regex replacements in Python 3

Question

I'm using Python 3.5.2

I have two lists

• a list of about 750,000 "sentences" (long strings)
• a list of about 20,000 "words" that I would like to delete from my 750,000 sentences

So, I have to loop through 750,000 sentences and perform about 20,000 replacements, but ONLY if my words are actually "words" and are not part of a larger string of characters.

I am doing this by pre-compiling my words so that they are flanked by the \b metacharacter

compiled_words = [re.compile(r'\b' + word + r'\b') for word in my20000words]

Then I loop through my "sentences"

import re

for sentence in sentences:
  for word in compiled_words:
    sentence = re.sub(word, "", sentence)
  # put sentence into a growing list

This nested loop is processing about 50 sentences per second, which is nice, but it still takes several hours to process all of my sentences.

• Is there a way to using the str.replace method (which I believe is faster), but still requiring that replacements only happen at word boundaries?

• Alternatively, is there a way to speed up the re.sub method? I have already improved the speed marginally by skipping over re.sub if the length of my word is > than the length of my sentence, but it's not much of an improvement.

Thank you for any suggestions.

Answer 1

TLDR

Use this method (with set lookup) if you want the fastest solution. For a dataset similar to the OP's, it's approximately 2000 times faster than the accepted answer.

If you insist on using a regex for lookup, use this trie-based version, which is still 1000 times faster than a regex union.

Theory

If your sentences aren't humongous strings, it's probably feasible to process many more than 50 per second.

If you save all the banned words into a set, it will be very fast to check if another word is included in that set.

Pack the logic into a function, give this function as argument to re.sub and you're done!

Code

import re
with open('/usr/share/dict/american-english') as wordbook:
    banned_words = set(word.strip().lower() for word in wordbook)


def delete_banned_words(matchobj):
    word = matchobj.group(0)
    if word.lower() in banned_words:
        return ""
    else:
        return word

sentences = ["I'm eric. Welcome here!", "Another boring sentence.",
             "GiraffeElephantBoat", "sfgsdg sdwerha aswertwe"] * 250000

word_pattern = re.compile('\w+')

for sentence in sentences:
    sentence = word_pattern.sub(delete_banned_words, sentence)

Converted sentences are:

' .  !
  .
GiraffeElephantBoat
sfgsdg sdwerha aswertwe

Note that:

• the search is case-insensitive (thanks to lower())
• replacing a word with "" might leave two spaces (as in your code)
• With python3, \w+ also matches accented characters (e.g. "ångström").
• Any non-word character (tab, space, newline, marks, ...) will stay untouched.

Performance

There are a million sentences, banned_words has almost 100000 words and the script runs in less than 7s.

In comparison, Liteye's answer needed 160s for 10 thousand sentences.

With n being the total amound of words and m the amount of banned words, OP's and Liteye's code are O(n*m).

In comparison, my code should run in O(n+m). Considering that there are many more sentences than banned words, the algorithm becomes O(n).

Regex union test

What's the complexity of a regex search with a '\b(word1|word2|...|wordN)\b' pattern? Is it O(N) or O(1)?

It's pretty hard to grasp the way the regex engine works, so let's write a simple test.

This code extracts 10**i random english words into a list. It creates the corresponding regex union, and tests it with different words :

• one is clearly not a word (it begins with #)
• one is the first word in the list
• one is the last word in the list
• one looks like a word but isn't

import re
import timeit
import random

with open('/usr/share/dict/american-english') as wordbook:
    english_words = [word.strip().lower() for word in wordbook]
    random.shuffle(english_words)

print("First 10 words :")
print(english_words[:10])

test_words = [
    ("Surely not a word", "#surely_NöTäWORD_so_regex_engine_can_return_fast"),
    ("First word", english_words[0]),
    ("Last word", english_words[-1]),
    ("Almost a word", "couldbeaword")
]


def find(word):
    def fun():
        return union.match(word)
    return fun

for exp in range(1, 6):
    print("\nUnion of %d words" % 10**exp)
    union = re.compile(r"\b(%s)\b" % '|'.join(english_words[:10**exp]))
    for description, test_word in test_words:
        time = timeit.timeit(find(test_word), number=1000) * 1000
        print("  %-17s : %.1fms" % (description, time))

It outputs:

First 10 words :
["geritol's", "sunstroke's", 'fib', 'fergus', 'charms', 'canning', 'supervisor', 'fallaciously', "heritage's", 'pastime']

Union of 10 words
  Surely not a word : 0.7ms
  First word        : 0.8ms
  Last word         : 0.7ms
  Almost a word     : 0.7ms

Union of 100 words
  Surely not a word : 0.7ms
  First word        : 1.1ms
  Last word         : 1.2ms
  Almost a word     : 1.2ms

Union of 1000 words
  Surely not a word : 0.7ms
  First word        : 0.8ms
  Last word         : 9.6ms
  Almost a word     : 10.1ms

Union of 10000 words
  Surely not a word : 1.4ms
  First word        : 1.8ms
  Last word         : 96.3ms
  Almost a word     : 116.6ms

Union of 100000 words
  Surely not a word : 0.7ms
  First word        : 0.8ms
  Last word         : 1227.1ms
  Almost a word     : 1404.1ms

So it looks like the search for a single word with a '\b(word1|word2|...|wordN)\b' pattern has:

• O(1) best case
• O(n/2) average case, which is still O(n)
• O(n) worst case

These results are consistent with a simple loop search.

A much faster alternative to a regex union is to create the regex pattern from a trie.