I would like to split a sting in python the most efficient way, and the most "python-like" way. Say I have this string:
s = '"Jens", "kasper", "Michael"'
How do I achieve the following list:
names = ["David", "Kasper", "Michael"]
Meaning I would like to strip the names between the curly brackets.
Use ast.literal_eval():
Safely evaluate an expression node or a Unicode or Latin-1 encoded string containing a Python expression. The string or node provided may only consist of the following Python literal structures: strings, numbers, tuples, lists, dicts, booleans, and None.
>>> from ast import literal_eval
>>> s = '"Jens", "kasper", "Michael"'
>>> literal_eval(s)
('Jens', 'kasper', 'Michael')
>>> list(literal_eval(s))
['Jens', 'kasper', 'Michael']
literal_eval just happens to work on some format that wasn't intended to be a Python literal format, that usually isn't a good reason to use it.
You can split it like this:
>>> s = '"Jens", "kasper", "Michael"'
>>> s.split(', ')
['"Jens"', '"kasper"', '"Michael"']
You can strip the quotes like this:
>>> [name.strip('"') for name in s.split(', ')]
['Jens', 'kasper', 'Michael']
But really, you should consider how this weird string was constructed, and do the matching operation, instead of trying to build a parser from first principles. Are these Python literals? JSON strings? Something else? Were they joined together with ', '.join or the CSV module or something else?
kasper or convert Jens into David… if you actually want that, you'll need a fuller specification of what you're after.Let's add a case to your string:
>>> s = '"Jens", "kasper", "Michael", "Jean Paul", "Bond, James"'
^^ comma
You can use csv:
>>> import csv
>>> list(csv.reader([s], skipinitialspace=True))[0]
['Jens', 'kasper', 'Michael', 'Jean Paul', 'Bond, James']
Or a regex:
>>> import re
>>> [e.group(1) for e in re.finditer(r'"([^"]+)"',s)]
['Jens', 'kasper', 'Michael', 'Jean Paul', 'Bond, James']
The solution based on splitting on the comma will not work with the embedded comma:
>>> s = '"Jens", "kasper", "Michael"'
>>> [e.strip().strip('"') for e in s.split(',')]
['Jens', 'kasper', 'Michael', 'Jean Paul', 'Bond', 'James']
^^^^ wrong answer...
I think dawg has the best one, but:
stringthing = "Your string here!=-Hi!"
a = stringthing.split("=-")
print("Thing 1: " + a[0] + " Thing 2: " + a[1])
