Split a string by unknown number of spaces in Python

Split a string by unknown number of spaces in Python #

Use the str.split() method without an argument to split a string by unknown number of spaces, e.g. my_list = my_str.split(). When the str.split() method is called without an argument, it considers consecutive whitespace characters as a single separator.

Copied!
my_str = 'one two   three       four'

my_list = my_str.split()

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

We used the str.split() method to split a string by unknown number of spaces.

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

The method takes the following 2 parameters:

If the string starts or ends with a trailing whitespace, the list won't contain empty string elements.

Copied!
my_str = '   one two   three       four   '

my_list = my_str.split()

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

Copied!
my_str = '         '

my_list = my_str.split()

print(my_list)  # 👉️ []

You can also use a regular expression to split a string by unknown number of spaces.

Use the re.split() method to split a string by unknown number of spaces, e.g. my_list = re.split(r'\s+', my_str). The re.split() method will split the string on each occurrence of one or more spaces and will return a list containing the results.

Copied!
import re

my_str = 'one two   three       four'

my_list = re.split(r'\s+', my_str)

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

The re.split method takes a pattern and a string and splits the string on each occurrence of the pattern.

The \s character matches unicode whitespace characters like [ \t\n\r\f\v].

The plus + is used to match the preceding character (whitespace) 1 or more times.

In its entirety, the regular expression matches one or more whitespace characters.

When using this approach, you would get empty string elements if your string starts with or ends with a whitespace.

Copied!
import re

my_str = '  one two   three       four  '

my_list = re.split(r'\s+', my_str)

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

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

Copied!
import re

my_str = '  one two   three       four  '

my_list = list(filter(None, re.split(r'\s+', my_str)))

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.