I would like to split a String by comma ',' and remove whitespace from the beginning and end of each split.
For example, if I have the string:
"QVOD, Baidu Player"
I would like to split and strip to:
['QVOD', 'Baidu Player']
Is there an elegant way of doing this? Possibly using a list comprehension?
Python has a spectacular function called split that will keep you from having to use a regex or something similar. You can split your string by just calling my_string.split(delimiter)
After that python has a strip function which will remove all whitespace from the beginning and end of a string.
[item.strip() for item in my_string.split(',')]
Benchmarks for the two methods are below:
>>> import timeit
>>> timeit.timeit('map(str.strip, "QVOD, Baidu Player".split(","))', number=100000)
0.3525350093841553
>>> timeit.timeit('map(stripper, "QVOD, Baidu Player".split(","))','stripper=str.strip', number=100000)
0.31575989723205566
>>> timeit.timeit("[item.strip() for item in 'QVOD, Baidu Player'.split(',')]", number=100000)
0.246596097946167
So the list comp is about 33% faster than the map.
Probably also worth noting that as far as being "pythonic" goes, Guido himself votes for the LC. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196
QVOD ect.. is placed on a new line. The answer below works well as everything is in a list.
A little functional approach. split function, splits the string based on , and the each and every element will be stripped by str.strip, by map.
>>> stripper = str.strip
>>> map(stripper, "QVOD, Baidu Player".split(","))
['QVOD', 'Baidu Player']
Little timing comparison
import timeit
stripper = str.strip
print timeit.timeit('map(stripper, "QVOD, Baidu Player".split(","))', "from __main__ import stripper", number=100000)
print timeit.timeit("[item.strip() for item in 'QVOD, Baidu Player'.split(',')]", number=100000)
Output on my machine
0.553178071976
0.569463968277
So, both the List comprehension method and map method perform almost the same.
str.strip to a variable? Why not pass it directly -map(str.strip, "QVOD, Baidu Player".split(","))str everytime. So, little performance gain :)str.strip to map(function, sequence) it is getting assigned to the function parameter and used locally as a variable there.