Split string with multiple-character delimiter

Question

say I have the following string:

"Hello there. My name is Fred. I am 25.5 years old."

I want to split this into sentences, so that I have the following list:

["Hello there", "My name is Fred", "I am 25.5 years old"]

As you can see, I want to split the string on all occurrences of the string ". ", not any occurrence of either "." or " ". Python's str.split() will not work in this case because it will treat each character of the string as a separate delimiter, rather than the whole string as a multi-character delimiter. Is there a simple way to solve this problem?

split does not behave like strip in that regard.

Jochen Ritzel
– Jochen Ritzel

2011-11-10 15:07:52 +00:00
Commented Nov 10, 2011 at 15:07 — Jochen Ritzel
– Jochen Ritzel, Commented Nov 10, 2011 at 15:07

Dogbert · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-10 15:05:51Z

38

Works for me

>>> "Hello there. My name is Fr.ed. I am 25.5 years old.".split(". ")
['Hello there', 'My name is Fr.ed', 'I am 25.5 years old.']

answered Nov 10, 2011 at 15:05

Dogbert

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1 Comment

varunl Over a year ago

That's a better solution than using regular expressions!

Austin Marshall · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-10 15:17:25Z

4

>>> "Hello there. My name is Fred. I am 25.5 years old.".rstrip(".").split(". ")
['Hello there', 'My name is Fred', 'I am 25.5 years old']

edited Nov 10, 2011 at 15:17

answered Nov 10, 2011 at 15:08

Austin Marshall

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Comments

Lycha · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-10 15:09:21Z

3

You can use split function in regular expression library :

import re
re.split('\. ', "Hello there. My name is Fred. I am 25.5 years old.")

answered Nov 10, 2011 at 15:09

Lycha

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IceArdor Over a year ago

Thanks for the alternative suggestion. This is helpful if I have multiple delimiters. re.split(r'[\s,.|/]+', 'The.\tbrown fox|jumped,over/the') returns ['The', 'brown', 'fox', 'jumped', 'over', 'the']

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