I want to be able to split a string that just contains letters into separate letters. From the code I have below; I expected the variable f to contain ['a','b'] but it did not. Any ideas as to how I might fix this problem?
a = "bc"
f = a.split()
print(f)
output:
['bc']
In that case you do not have to split: a string is iterable over its characters, so you can simply use:
f = list(a)
This will construct a list such that every character in the string is an element in the resulting list:
>>> a="foobar"
>>> f=list(a)
>>> f
['f', 'o', 'o', 'b', 'a', 'r']
join it back into a string.If you try by direction iteration then:
x=[i for i in a]
now analyzing its time with respect to that for list(a);
tarptaeya@TARPTAEYA:~$ python -m timeit "a='foobar';x=[i for i in a]"
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.443 usec per loop
tarptaeya@TARPTAEYA:~$ python -m timeit "a='foobar';list(a)"
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.385 usec per loop
hence splitting using list() method is more efficient method compared to first .
If you want to get only letter.
>>> val = 'abcdefg 12'
>>> [item for item in list(val) if item.isalpha()]
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g']
Another solution:
>>> filter(lambda x: x.isalpha(), list(val))
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g']
