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I am working on the models of different product types and wish to generalize them to the same entity. For example, from the given list

Toshiba-A40C
Toshiba B30
Toshiba-Z40C411
Asus -X540
Asus R4
Dell XPS 15
Dell Inspiron 13

I would like to get a clean list of

Toshiba
Toshiba
Toshiba
Asus
Asus
Dell
Dell

Is there a programmatic way to get this one ? Is this called a record linkage? What are your recommendations ?

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  • $\begingroup$ Index-Match or Vlookup in Excel could accomplish this simply. R base code allows you to look up a value in a dataset (like the one you have above) given an input value. $\endgroup$
    – ERT
    Commented Jul 24, 2018 at 20:39
  • $\begingroup$ Thank you @ERT . What if the first word is misspelled such as Thoshiba- A40C. Is there a way we can generalize it to 'Toshiba' ? $\endgroup$
    – user_01
    Commented Jul 24, 2018 at 20:43

1 Answer 1

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I know that there are better solutions to this problem. I used a regular expression to match first space or dash and then cut the original list.

import re

example = """Toshiba-A40C
Toshiba B30
Toshiba-Z40C411
Asus -X540
Asus R4
Dell XPS 15
Dell Inspiron 13""".split('\n')

regular_exp = '(?: +)|(-)'

for i in range(len(example)):
    where = re.search(regular_exp, example[i]).span()
    example[i] = example[i][:where[0]]

print(example)
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