CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonstringsplitextract
Lior Dahan
Lior Dahan

Reputation: 762

How to extract the first and final words from a string?

I have a small problem with something I need to do in school...

My task is the get a raw input string from a user (text = raw_input()) and I need to print the first and final words of that string.

Can someone help me with that? I have been looking for an answer all day...

Upvotes: 27

Views: 115820

Answers (8)

John Henckel
John Henckel

Reputation: 11357

Yet another possible implementation, which does not use split()

text = 'hello how are you?'
first = text[:text.find(' ')]
last = text[text.rfind(' ') + 1:]

Be aware, this has a lot of problems with edge cases (empty string, one word, etc)

Upvotes: 0

Gil Paz
Gil Paz

Reputation: 41

You can use .split and pop to retrieve the words from a string. use "0" to get the first word and "-1" for the last word.

string = str(input())
print(string.split().pop(0))
print(string.split().pop(-1))

Upvotes: 4

Cybernetic
Cybernetic

Reputation: 13334

Simply pass your string into the following function: 

def first_and_final(str):
    res = str.split(' ')
    fir = res[0]
    fin = res[len(res)-1]
    return([fir, fin])

Usage: 

first_and_final('This is a sentence with a first and final word.')

Result: 

['This', 'word.']

Upvotes: 2

Moinuddin Quadri
Moinuddin Quadri

Reputation: 48067

You have to firstly convert the string to list of words using str.split and then you may access it like:

>>> my_str = "Hello SO user, How are you"
>>> word_list = my_str.split()  # list of words

# first word  v              v last word
>>> word_list[0], word_list[-1]
('Hello', 'you')

From Python 3.x, you may simply do:

>>> first, *middle, last = my_str.split()

Upvotes: 56

Anand Chitipothu
Anand Chitipothu

Reputation: 4367

If you are using Python 3, you can do this:

text = input()
first, *middle, last = text.split()
print(first, last)

All the words except the first and last will go into the variable middle.

Upvotes: 24

quapka
quapka

Reputation: 2929

Some might say, there is never too many answer's using regular expressions (in this case, this looks like the worst solutions..):

>>> import re
>>> string = "Hello SO user, How are you"
>>> matches = re.findall(r'^\w+|\w+$', string)
>>> print(matches)
['Hello', 'you']

Upvotes: 5

toom
toom

Reputation: 231

Let's say x is your input. Then you may do:

 x.partition(' ')[0]
 x.partition(' ')[-1]

Upvotes: 8

Mike
Mike

Reputation: 1735

You would do:

print text.split()[0], text.split()[-1]

Upvotes: 7

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