CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonstringlist
espktro
espktro

Reputation: 167

split string in python to get one value?

Need help, let's assume that I have a string 'Sam-Person' in a variable called 'input'

name, kind = input.split('-')

By doing the above, I get two variable with different strings 'Sam' and 'Person'

is there a way to only get the first value name = 'Sam' without the need of the extra variable 'kind' and without having to work with lists?

When doing this, assuming that I was going to get only 'Sam':

name = input.split('-')

I get a list, and then I can access the values by index name[0] or name[1], but it is not what I want, I just want to directly get 'Sam' into the variable 'name', is there a way to do that or an alternative to split?

Upvotes: 11

Views: 58593

Answers (2)

Blckknght
Blckknght

Reputation: 104722

If you don't need the second part of the split, you could instead try searching the string for the index of the first - character and then slicing to that index:

string[:string.index('-')]

This is a little bit faster than splitting and discarding the second part because it doesn't need to create a second string instance that you don't need.

Be aware that this code will raise an exception if there's no - in the string, as did your original code. A solution using split like falsetru's will return the full string instead (which may or may not be better).

Upvotes: 4

falsetru
falsetru

Reputation: 369134

Assign the first item directly to the variable.

>>> string = 'Sam-Person'
>>> name = string.split('-')[0]
>>> name
'Sam'

You can specify maxsplit argument, because you want to get only the first item.

>>> name = string.split('-', 1)[0]

Upvotes: 22

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