How to split a string into a list?

Question

I want my Python function to split a sentence (input) and store each word in a list. My current code splits the sentence, but does not store the words as a list. How do I do that?

def split_line(text):

    # split the text
    words = text.split()

    # for each word in the line:
    for word in words:

        # print the word
        print(word)

Answer 1

shlex has a .split() function. It differs from str.split() in that it does not preserve quotes and treats a quoted phrase as a single word:

>>> import shlex
>>> shlex.split("sudo echo 'foo && bar'")
['sudo', 'echo', 'foo && bar']

Answer 2

If you want all the chars of a word/sentence in a list, do this:

print(list("word"))
#  ['w', 'o', 'r', 'd']


print(list("some sentence"))
#  ['s', 'o', 'm', 'e', ' ', 's', 'e', 'n', 't', 'e', 'n', 'c', 'e']

Answer 3

How about this algorithm? Split text on whitespace, then trim punctuation. This carefully removes punctuation from the edge of words, without harming apostrophes inside words such as we're.

>>> text
"'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'"

>>> text.split()
["'Oh,", 'you', "can't", 'help', "that,'", 'said', 'the', 'Cat:', "'we're", 'all', 'mad', 'here.', "I'm", 'mad.', "You're", "mad.'"]

>>> import string
>>> [word.strip(string.punctuation) for word in text.split()]
['Oh', 'you', "can't", 'help', 'that', 'said', 'the', 'Cat', "we're", 'all', 'mad', 'here', "I'm", 'mad', "You're", 'mad']

Answer 4

I think you are confused because of a typo.

Replace print(words) with print(word) inside your loop to have every word printed on a different line

Answer 5

Splits the string in text on any consecutive runs of whitespace.

words = text.split()      

Split the string in text on delimiter: ",".

words = text.split(",")   

The words variable will be a list and contain the words from text split on the delimiter.

Answer 6

text.split()

This should be enough to store each word in a list. words is already a list of the words from the sentence, so there is no need for the loop.

Second, it might be a typo, but you have your loop a little messed up. If you really did want to use append, it would be:

words.append(word)

not

word.append(words)