Question 6.6: Creating a List by Parsing a String You need to convert a st......
Creating a List by Parsing a String
You need to convert a string of words separated by some character into an array of strings with each string in the array being one of the words.
Use the split Python string function.
The command split with no parameters separates the words out of a string into individual elements of an array:
| >>> “abc def ghi”.split() [‘abc’, ‘def’, ‘ghi’] |
If you supply split with a parameter, then it will split the string using the parameter as a separator. For example:
| >>> “abc–de–ghi”.split(‘–‘) [‘abc’, ‘de’, ‘ghi’] |
Discussion
This command can be very useful when you are, say, importing data from a file. The split command can optionally take an argument that is the string to use as a delimiter when you are splitting the string. So, if you were to use commas as a separator, you could split the string as follows:
| >>> “abc,def,ghi”.split(‘,’) [‘abc’, ‘def’, ‘ghi’] |
See Also
All the recipes between Recipes 6.1 and 6.11 involve the use of lists.