CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
Dean013
Dean013

Reputation: 393

Failing to Split String

I am having a stupid problem where there are blank items in the list. There are if statements in it to attempt to offset it, but even with them, the output contains empty parts.

I have been playing around with string.split() a lot and found that what it takes is really specific, and each time i attempt to make it work, it fails. What's going wrong?

a = 'Beautiful, is==; better*than\nugly'
import re

a = re.split(',|\s|=|;|\*|\n| ',a)

for x in a:
    if x == '\n':
        a.remove(x)
    elif x == ' ':
        a.remove(x)
    elif x == '':
        a.remove(x)

print(a)
print("REE")

I want the outcome to only be: ['Beautiful', 'is', 'better', 'than', 'ugly']

But the actual outcome is: ['Beautiful', '', 'is', '', '', '', 'better', 'than', 'ugly']

Upvotes: 0

Views: 356

Answers (1)

CryptoFool
CryptoFool

Reputation: 23089

You want to split on groups of any number of your delimiter characters. The way you're doing it now, you're splitting on only one at a time. This gives you what you want:

import re

a = 'Beautiful, is==; better*than\nugly'

a = re.split(r'[,\s=;*\n]+',a)

print(a)

Result:

['Beautiful', 'is', 'better', 'than', 'ugly']

If you want to split on all non-alphanumeric characters, you can use this expression instead:

a = re.split(r'[^\w]+',a)

Upvotes: 1

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