Split a string by backslash in Python

Split a string by backslash in Python #

Use the str.split() method to split a string on the backslashes, e.g. my_list = my_str.split('\\'). The str.split method will split the string on each occurrence of a backslash and will return a list containing the results.

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# ✅ split string on each occurrence of backslash
my_str = 'one\\two\\three\\four'

my_list = my_str.split('\\')
print(my_list)  # 👉️ ['one', 'two', 'three', 'four']

# ✅ split string on each space or backslash
my_str_2 = 'one two\\three four five'
my_list_2 = my_str_2.replace('\\', ' ').split(' ')

print(my_list_2)  # 👉️ ['one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five']

The str.split() method splits the original string into a list of substrings using a delimiter.

The method takes the following 2 parameters:

Notice that we had to use a second backslash to escape the first.

By adding a second backslash, we treat the \ as a literal character.

If you have a string literal, you can also prefix it with r to mark it as a raw string.

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my_str = r'one\two\three\four'

my_list = my_str.split('\\')
print(my_list)  # 👉️ ['one', 'two', 'three', 'four']

If your string starts with or ends with a backslash, you would get empty string elements in the list.

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my_str = '\\one\\two\\three\\four\\'

my_list = my_str.split('\\')
print(my_list)  # 👉️ ['', 'one', 'two', 'three', 'four', '']

You can use the filter() function to remove any empty strings from the list.

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my_str = '\\one\\two\\three\\four\\'

my_list = list(filter(None, my_str.split('\\')))
print(my_list)  # 👉️ ['one', 'two', 'three', 'four']

The filter function takes a function and an iterable as arguments and constructs an iterator from the elements of the iterable for which the function returns a truthy value.

All values that are not truthy are considered falsy. The falsy values in Python are:

• constants defined to be falsy: None and False.
• 0 (zero) of any numeric type
• empty sequences and collections: "" (empty string), () (empty tuple), [] (empty list), {} (empty dictionary), set() (empty set), range(0) (empty range).

Note that the filter() function returns a filter object, so we have to use the list() class to convert the filter object to a list.

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my_str_2 = 'one two\\three four five'
my_list_2 = my_str_2.replace('\\', ' ').split(' ')

print(my_list_2)  # 👉️ ['one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five']

We replaced all occurrences of a backslash with a space and split the string on each space.

You could achieve the same result by replacing each occurrence of a space with a backslash and splitting on each backslash.

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my_str_2 = 'one two\\three four five'
my_list_2 = my_str_2.replace(' ', '\\').split('\\')

print(my_list_2)  # 👉️ ['one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five']