Phrase Matcher space sensitive issue

[AnishaMohandass]

terms = ["Barack Obama", "Angela Merkel", "Washington, D.C."]
doc = nlp("German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Barack Obama "
"converse in the Oval Office inside the White House in Washington, D.C.")

If I enter an extra space between the words "Barack Obama", the phrase matcher does not work since it is space sensitive.
Is there a way to overcome this space sensitive issue?

Your Environment

• Operating System: Windows 8
• Python Version Used: 3.7
• spaCy Version Used: 2.2.3
• Environment Information: Conda

[svlandeg]

The PhraseMatcher is not just space sensitive - it really requires the terms to appear in the text exactly as in the terms list.

One option is to expand your terms list with lexical variants such as added spaces, but that's not a very elegant solution.

Another option is to pre-process your input texts and remove multiple spaces, if those are a frequent problem in your input text (do this before you do any spaCy processing at all).

A final option I can think of, is to look into Matching regular expressions on the full text. With regular expressions, you can succintly match on various lexical spelling variants.

[AnishaMohandass]

Thanks for your response @svlandeg.
Pre-processing the input text to remove multiple spaces, works fine.

input_text = "German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Barack Obama converse in the Oval Office inside the White House in Washington, D.C."
sentence = re.sub(' +',' ', input_text)