Ngrams.py

Ngrams.py

def ngrams(string, n=3):
    string = fix_text(string) # fix text encoding issues
    string = string.encode("ascii", errors="ignore").decode() #remove non ascii chars
    string = string.lower() #make lower case
    chars_to_remove = [")","(",".","|","[","]","{","}","'"]
    rx = '[' + re.escape(''.join(chars_to_remove)) + ']'
    string = re.sub(rx, '', string) #remove the list of chars defined above
    string = string.replace('&', 'and')
    string = string.replace(',', ' ')
    string = string.replace('-', ' ')
    string = string.title() # normalise case - capital at start of each word
    string = re.sub(' +',' ',string).strip() # get rid of multiple spaces and replace with a single space
    string = ' '+ string +' ' # pad names for ngrams...
    string = re.sub(r'[,-./]|\sBD',r'', string)
    ngrams = zip(*[string[i:] for i in range(n)])
    return [''.join(ngram) for ngram in ngrams]

What is the fix_text(string) definition?

Hi - this relates to cleaning up encoding issues using https://ftfy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

What's the 're' in this script?