How to split a paragraph of text into individual sentences in Python

To split a paragraph of text into individual sentences in Python, you can use the nltk library, which provides a sent_tokenize() function for this purpose. Here’s an example:

import nltk
nltk.download('punkt')

my_paragraph = "This is the first sentence. This is the second sentence. This is the third sentence."

my_sentences = nltk.sent_tokenize(my_paragraph)

print(my_sentences)

In this example, the nltk.sent_tokenize() function is used to split the my_paragraph variable into a list of individual sentences based on punctuation and common abbreviations. This function uses a pre-trained machine learning model to identify sentence boundaries.

You’ll also notice that we first had to download the “punkt” tokenizer from the nltk data sets using nltk.download('punkt').

The resulting my_sentences list will contain three strings, each one representing an individual sentence from the original paragraph.

To split a paragraph of text using a regular expression in Python

To split a paragraph of text using a regular expression in Python, you can use the re module along with the re.split() function. Here’s an example:

import re

my_paragraph = "This is the first sentence. This is the second sentence. This is the third sentence."

my_sentences = re.split("(?<=[.!?]) +", my_paragraph)

print(my_sentences)

In this example, the re.split() function is used to split the my_paragraph variable into a list of individual sentences based on a regular expression pattern that matches periods, exclamation points, and question marks followed by one or more spaces. The (?<=[.!?]) positive lookbehind assertion is used to include the punctuation mark in the split result.

The resulting my_sentences list will contain three strings, each one representing an individual sentence from the original paragraph.

You can adjust the regular expression pattern to match other types of sentence delimiters or different types of whitespace as needed.

To split a paragraph of text into individual sentences in Python using split()

To split a paragraph of text into individual sentences in Python using split(), you can split the paragraph based on the delimiter that separates the sentences, which is usually a period, exclamation point, or question mark. Here’s an example:

my_paragraph = "This is the first sentence. This is the second sentence. This is the third sentence."

my_sentences = my_paragraph.split(". ")

print(my_sentences)

In this example, the split() method is used to split the my_paragraph variable into a list of individual sentences based on the period and space delimiter “. “. The resulting my_sentences list will contain three strings, each one representing an individual sentence from the original paragraph.

Note that this method may not work as well if there are unusual sentence structures or variable spacing between sentences. In those cases, you may want to consider using one of the methods mentioned earlier, such as re.split() or the nltk library.