I'm trying to find the most pythonic way to split a string like
"some words in a string"
into single words. string.split(' ') works ok but it returns a bunch of white space entries in the list. Of course i could iterate the list and remove the white spaces but I was wondering if there was a better way?
Just use my_str.split() without ' '.
More, you can also indicate how many splits to perform by specifying the second parameter:
>>> ' 1 2 3 4 '.split(None, 2)
['1', '2', '3 4 ']
>>> ' 1 2 3 4 '.split(None, 1)
['1', '2 3 4 ']
How about:
re.split(r'\s+',string)
\s is short for any whitespace. So \s+ is a contiguous whitespace.
Use string.split() without an argument or re.split(r'\s+', string) instead:
>>> s = 'some words in a string with spaces'
>>> s.split()
['some', 'words', 'in', 'a', 'string', 'with', 'spaces']
>>> import re; re.split(r'\s+', s)
['some', 'words', 'in', 'a', 'string', 'with', 'spaces']
From the docs:
If
sepis not specified or isNone, a different splitting algorithm is applied: runs of consecutive whitespace are regarded as a single separator, and the result will contain no empty strings at the start or end if the string has leading or trailing whitespace. Consequently, splitting an empty string or a string consisting of just whitespace with aNoneseparator returns[].
>>> a = "some words in a string"
>>> a.split(" ")
['some', 'words', 'in', 'a', 'string']
split parameter is not included in the result, so i guess theres something more about your string. otherwise, it should work
if you have more than one whitespace just use split() without parameters
>>> a = "some words in a string "
>>> a.split()
['some', 'words', 'in', 'a', 'string']
>>> a.split(" ")
['some', 'words', 'in', 'a', 'string', '', '', '', '', '']
or it will just split a by single whitespaces
The most Pythonic and correct ways is to just not specify any delimiter:
"some words in a string".split()
# => ['some', 'words', 'in', 'a', 'string']
Also read: How can I split by 1 or more occurrences of a delimiter in Python?
text = "".join([w and w+" " for w in text.split(" ")])
converts large spaces into single spaces