10.24. 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)

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(ch09_split1)

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)

​

(ch09_split2)

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))

​

(ch09_join)

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

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