Python language basics 37: splitting a delimited string

Introduction

In the previous post we saw how to efficiently concatenate strings using the join function. We showed a little trick to build one string from several others with a space in between.

In this post we’ll quickly look at the exact opposite, i.e. how to split a delimited string.

The split function

The split function operates on a string and accepts a delimiter as an argument. It will return the individual string elements in a string list:

start = "This|is|a|delimited|string"
spl = start.split('|')
print(spl)

This will print…

[‘This’, ‘is’, ‘a’, ‘delimited’, ‘string’]

What if you’d like to get the individual strings from “Welcome to my blog dear readers”? The elements are delimited by a space so the solution is straightforward:

start = "Welcome to my blog dear readers"
spl = start.split(' ')
print(spl)

‘spl’ evaluates to…

[‘Welcome’, ‘to’, ‘my’, ‘blog’, ‘dear’, ‘readers’]

…as expected.

Read the next post here.

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