I'm looking for the Python equivalent of
String str = "many fancy word \nhello \thi";
String whiteSpaceRegex = "\\s";
String[] words = str.split(whiteSpaceRegex);
["many", "fancy", "word", "hello", "hi"]
Add a comment
|
4 Answers
The str.split() method without an argument splits on whitespace:
>>> "many fancy word \nhello \thi".split()
['many', 'fancy', 'word', 'hello', 'hi']
9 Comments
yak
Also good to know is that if you want the first word only (which means passing
1 as second argument), you can use None as the first argument: s.split(None, 1)
Raymond Hettinger
If you only want the first word, use str.partition.
user3527975
@yak : Can you please edit your comment. The way it sounds right now is that s.split(None, 1) would return 1st word only. It rather gives a list of size 2. First item being the first word, second - rest of the string.
s.split(None, 1)[0] would return the first word only
Sven Marnach
@galois No, it uses a custom implementation (which is faster). Also note that it handles leading and trailing whitespace differently.
Sven Marnach
@KishorPawar It's rather unclear to me what you are trying to achieve. Do you want to split on whitespace, but disregard whitespace inside single-quoted substrings? If so, you can look into
shlex.split(), which may be what you are looking for. Otherwise I suggest asking a new question – you will get a much quicker and more detailed answer. |
import re
s = "many fancy word \nhello \thi"
re.split('\s+', s)
3 Comments
Gulzar
this gives me a whitespace token at the end of the line. No idea why, the original line doesn't even have that. Maybe this ignores newline?
Óscar López
@Gulzar do a
strip() at the end
Mark Jin
Note that this is usually slower than str.split if performance is an issue.
Using split() will be the most Pythonic way of splitting on a string.
It's also useful to remember that if you use split() on a string that does not have a whitespace then that string will be returned to you in a list.
Example:
>>> "ark".split()
['ark']
Comments
Another method through re module. It does the reverse operation of matching all the words instead of spitting the whole sentence by space.
>>> import re
>>> s = "many fancy word \nhello \thi"
>>> re.findall(r'\S+', s)
['many', 'fancy', 'word', 'hello', 'hi']
Above regex would match one or more non-space characters.
