10.25. Strings and Lists

Two of the most useful methods on strings involve lists of strings. The split method breaks a string into a list of words. By default, any number of whitespace characters is considered a word boundary.

song = "The rain in Spain..." wds = song.split() print(wds)

An optional argument called a delimiter can be used to specify which characters to use as word boundaries. The following example uses the string ai as the delimiter:

song = "The rain in Spain..." wds = song.split('ai') print(wds)

Notice that the delimiter doesn’t appear in the result.

The inverse of the split method is join. You choose a desired separator string, (often called the glue) and join the list with the glue between each of the elements.

wds = ["red", "blue", "green"] glue = ';' s = glue.join(wds) print(s) print(wds) print("***".join(wds)) print("".join(wds))

The list that you glue together (wds in this example) is not modified. Also, you can use empty glue or multi-character strings as glue.

Check your understanding

What is printed by the following statements?

myname = "Edgar Allan Poe"
namelist = myname.split()
init = ""
for aname in namelist:
    init = init + aname[0]
print(init)

• Poe
• Three characters but not the right ones. namelist is the list of names.
• EdgarAllanPoe
• Too many characters in this case. There should be a single letter from each name.
• EAP
• Yes, split creates a list of the three names. The for loop iterates through the names and creates a string from the first characters.
• William Shakespeare
• That does not make any sense.

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