Given a string:
str = "apple AND orange OR banana"
I want to split it by "AND" or "OR". The expected result is
['apple', 'orange', 'banana']
Is any simple way for python to do it?
Thanks!
4 Answers
You can use regex to split based on any combinations of uppercase letters with len 1 or more :
>>> tr = "apple AND orange OR banana"
>>> re.split(r'[A-Z]+',tr)
['apple ', ' orange ', ' banana']
But if you just want to split with AND or OR :
>>> re.split(r'AND|OR',tr)
['apple ', ' orange ', ' banana']
And for remove the spaces if you are sure that your sentence are contain distinc words you can do :
>>> re.split(r'[A-Z ]+',tr)
['apple', 'orange', 'banana']
If you have a AND or OR in leading or trailing of your string using split will create a empty string in result , for get ride of that you can loop over splited list and check for validation of items, but as a more elegant way you can use re.findall :
with r'[^A-Z ]+' as its pattern :
>>> tr = "AND apple AND orangeOR banana"
>>> re.split(r'\s?(?:AND|OR)\s?',tr)
['', 'apple', 'orange', 'banana']
>>> re.split(r'[A-Z ]+',tr)
['', 'apple', 'orange', 'banana']
>>> [i for i in re.split(r'[A-Z ]+',tr) if i]
['apple', 'orange', 'banana']
>>> re.findall(r'[^A-Z ]+',tr)
['apple', 'orange', 'banana']
3 Comments
dhke
Use
'\s+(AND|OR)\s+' and the whitespace is gone, too ;-)
Padraic Cunningham
Your last code will fail if there is an OR or AND at the beginning or end of the string
Kasravnd
@PadraicCunningham yea! i miss
? but i fixed the answer! better!I can think of two ways to accomplish this:
In [230]: s = "apple AND orange OR banana"
In [231]: delims = ["AND", "OR"]
In [232]: for d in delims:
.....: s = s.replace(d, '-')
.....:
In [233]: s.split('-')
Out[233]: ['apple ', ' orange ', ' banana']
OR
In [234]: s = "apple AND orange OR banana"
In [235]: delims = ["AND", "OR"]
In [236]: for d in delims:
.....: s = s.replace(d, ' ')
.....:
In [237]: s.split()
Out[237]: ['apple', 'orange', 'banana']
2 Comments
James Mertz
Besides using two
for loops this is the cleanest way I could think of.
Antoine Magron
You'd need to find a delimiter that's not in hour string already. Which can be challenging.
You can split and filter with a set:
s = "apple AND orange OR banana"
print([word for word in s.split() if word not in {"AND","OR"}])
['apple', 'orange', 'banana']
answered Mar 18, 2015 at 19:50
Padraic Cunningham
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Comments
Why not use filter and re.split like this:
my_list = list(filter(None, re.split("\s*(?:AND|OR)\s*", my_str)))
This will work even in the case that AND or OR is at the very beginning of your string. Also, you should be aware that str is a pretty terrible variable name since it is a built-in.
This gives the output:
['apple', 'orange', 'banana']
stras a variable name.stris a well-known builtin and you are asking for all kinds of trouble overriding it.