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Community Blog Data Analysis: FlashTex or RegEx

Data Analysis: FlashTex or RegEx

In this article, we will discuss how you can use FlashText, a python library that is 100 times faster than RegEx to perform data analysis.

Before you proceed with your analysis, you need to clean your source data, even for the simplest text. This often includes searching and replacing keywords. For example, search the corpus for the keyword "Python," or replace all "python" to "Python."

The Smarter and Faster way of Data Cleansing - FlashText

As the name suggests, FlashText is one of the fastest ways to execute search and replace keywords. It is an open source python library on GitHub.

When using FlashText, begin by providing a list of keywords. FlashText uses this list to build an internal Trie dictionary. You then send it a string of text depending on whether you want to search or replace.

Why is FlashText so Fast?

To truly understand the reason behind FlashText’s speed, let us consider an example. Take a sentence that comprises three words "I like Python". Assume that you have a corpus of four words {Python, Java, J2ee, and Ruby}.

If for every word in the corpus, you select it out and see if it appears in the sentence, you need to iterate the string four times.

For n words in the corpus, we need n iterations. And each step (is in sentence?) will take its own time. This is the logic behind RegEx matching.
There is also an alternative method that contradicts the first method. That is for each word in the sentence, see if it exists in the corpus.

For m words in the sentence, you have m cycles. In the situation, the time spent only depends on the number of words in the sentence. You can quickly perform this step (is in corpus?) using a dictionary.

The FlashText algorithm uses the second method. Moreover, Aho-Corasick algorithm and Trie data structure inspire its algorithm.

When do You Need to Use FlashText?

In terms of search, if the number of keywords is greater than 500, FlashText will perform better than RegEx.

Additionally, RegEx can search special characters such as "^, $, *, d" but FlashText does not support them.

You cannot match partial words (for example "worddvec"), but it can match full word ("word2vec").

Take a look at the basic usage of FlashText. Give it a try. You will observe that it is much faster than RegEx.

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