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pythonlistsplitwhitespace
Matt
Matt

Reputation: 83

Python - string.split() but ignore single spaces (e.g. between words)

The idea is the following: 

string = 'ABC DEF  GHI JK    LMNO P'

list = string.split()

print(list)

Output:

ABC DEF
GHI JK
LMNO P

Obviously that doesn't quite work. Is there a trick with .split to ignore single spaces when splitting a string?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1846

Answers (3)

jws1
jws1

Reputation: 111

If you want to do this without using regex then you can just split on spaces like you were doing and filter the results. Like so:

astring = 'ABC DEF  GHI JK    LMNO P'

def strip_spaces(astring):
    temp = astring.split(" ")
    return [element for element in temp if len(element) != 0]

    print(strip_spaces(astring))

# Output: ['ABC', 'DEF', 'GHI', 'JK', 'LMNO', 'P']

Upvotes: 0

AmphotericLewisAcid
AmphotericLewisAcid

Reputation: 2299

This is the sort of problem where regular expressions excel. So let's construct a regex to find all the spaces, that have more than one space character. \s matches spaces, so let's go with that:

\s

And to match N-or-more than something in regex, you put a {N,} after the expression. So, let's put {2,} in to match for 2-or-more:

\s{2,}

Now that we have our regular expression, we need a regular expression parser. Python comes with one built in. Python's regex module also comes with a function that will split every time the regular expression pings on a match. So, we do:

import re # This is the built-in regex module
string = "ABC DEF  GHI JK    LMNO P"
my_list = re.split("\s{2,}", string)

Unrelated to this question, note how I changed your variable from list to my_list. This is because list is a built-in keyword in Python, that you don't want to over-write.

Upvotes: 2

DYZ
DYZ

Reputation: 57033

Use regular expressions to split by two or more spaces:

import re
re.split("\s{2,}", string)
#['ABC DEF', 'GHI JK', 'LMNO P']

Upvotes: 2

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