Split by comma and strip whitespace in Python

Question

I have some python code that splits on comma  but doesn t strip the whitespace    gt  gt  gt  string    blah  lots     of    spaces  here    gt  gt  gt  mylist   string split       gt  gt  gt  print mylist   blah     lots        of       spaces     here      I would rather end up with whitespace removed like this     blah    lots    of    spaces    here     I am aware that I could loop through the list and strip   each item but  as this is Python  I m guessing there s a quicker  easier and more elegant way of doing it

User · Answer

I know this has already been answered  but if you end doing this a lot  regular expressions may be a better way to go    gt  gt  gt  import re  gt  gt  gt  re sub r  s       string  split        blah    lots    of    spaces    here     The  s matches any whitespace character  and we just replace it with an empty string     You can find more info here  http   docs python org library re html re sub

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I came to add   map str strip  string split        but saw it had already been mentioned by Jason Orendorff in a comment   Reading Glenn Maynard s comment in the same answer suggesting list comprehensions over map I started to wonder why  I assumed he meant for performance reasons  but of course he might have meant for stylistic reasons  or something else  Glenn     So a quick  possibly flawed   test on my box applying the three methods in a loop revealed    word strip   for word in string split         time   list comprehension py  real    0m22 876s  map lambda s  s strip    string split         time   map with lambda py  real    0m25 736s  map str strip  string split         time   map with str strip py  real    0m19 428s   making map str strip  string split       the winner  although it seems they are all in the same ballpark   Certainly though map  with or without a lambda  should not necessarily be ruled out for performance reasons  and for me it is at least as clear as a list comprehension   Edit   Python 2 6 5 on Ubuntu 10 04

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map lambda s  s strip    mylist  would be a little better than explicitly looping  Or for the whole thing at once    map lambda s s strip    string split         That s basically everything you need

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Use list comprehension -- simpler  and just as easy to read as a for loop   my string    blah  lots     of    spaces  here   result    x strip   for x in my string split         result is   blah    lots    of    spaces    here     See  Python docs on List Comprehension A good 2 second explanation of list comprehension

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Split using a regular expression  Note I made the case more general with leading spaces  The list comprehension is to remove the null strings at the front and back    gt  gt  gt  import re  gt  gt  gt  string      blah  lots     of    spaces  here    gt  gt  gt  pattern   re compile    s   s   s   s      gt  gt  gt  print  x for x in pattern split string  if x     blah    lots    of    spaces    here     This works even if   s  doesn t match    gt  gt  gt  string    foo    bar     gt  gt  gt  print  x for x in pattern split string  if x     foo    bar    gt  gt  gt    Here s why you need   s     gt  gt  gt  pattern   re compile   s   s   s      gt  gt  gt  print  x for x in pattern split string  if x       blah    lots    of    spaces    here     See the leading spaces in blah   Clarification  above uses the Python 3 interpreter  but results are the same in Python 2

User · Answer

import re result  x for x in re split       your string  if x        this works fine for me

User · Answer

map lambda s  s strip    mylist  would be a little better than explicitly looping  Or for the whole thing at once  map lambda s s strip    string split

User · Answer

re  as in regular expressions  allows splitting on multiple characters at once     string    blah  lots     of    spaces  here     re split      string    blah    lots       of      spaces    here      This doesn t work well for your example string  but works nicely for a comma-space separated list  For your example string  you can combine the re split power to split on regex patterns to get a  split-on-this-or-that  effect     re split        string    blah          lots                         of                    spaces          here          Unfortunately  that s ugly  but a filter will do the trick     filter None  re split        string     blah    lots    of    spaces    here     Voila

User · Answer

import re mylist    x for x in re compile   s     s   s    split string     Simply  comma or at least one white spaces with without preceding succeeding white spaces   Please try

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s    bla  buu  jii   sp      sp   s split      for st in sp      print st

User · Answer

Just remove the white space from the string before you split it    mylist   my string replace         split

[python] Split by comma and strip whitespace in Python

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