Problem Formulation
Say, you use the re.split(pattern, string) function to split a string on all occurrences of a given pattern. If the pattern appears at the beginning or the end of the string, the resulting split list will contain empty strings. How to get rid of the empty strings automatically?
Here’s an example:
import re
s = '--hello-world_how are\tyou-----------today\t'
words = re.split('[-_\s]+', s)
print(words)
# ['', 'hello', 'world', 'how', 'are', 'you', 'today', '']Note the empty strings in the resulting list.
Background
The re.split(pattern, string) method matches all occurrences of the pattern in the string and divides the string along the matches resulting in a list of strings between the matches. For example, re.split('a', 'bbabbbab') results in the list of strings ['bb', 'bbb', 'b']—and re.split('a', 'abbabbbaba') results in the list of strings ['', 'bb', 'bbb', 'b', ''] with empty strings.
Related Article: Python Regex Split
Method 1: Remove all Empty Strings From the List using List Comprehension
The trivial solution to this problem is to remove all empty strings from the resulting list using list comprehension with a condition such as [x for x in words if x!=''] to filter out the empty string.
import re
s = '--hello-world_how are\tyou-----------today\t'
# Method 1: Remove all Empty Strings From the List
words = re.split('[-_\s]+', s)
words = [x for x in words if x!='']
print(words)
# ['hello', 'world', 'how', 'are', 'you', 'today']Method 2: Remove all Empty Strings From the List using filter()
An alternative solution is to remove all empty strings from the resulting list using filter() such as filter(bool, words) to filter out the empty string '' and other elements that evaluate to False such as None.
import re
s = '--hello-world_how are\tyou-----------today\t'
# Method 2: Remove Empty Strings From List using filter()
words = re.split('[-_\s]+', s)
words = list(filter(bool, words))
print(words)
# ['hello', 'world', 'how', 'are', 'you', 'today']
Method 3: Use re.findall() Instead
A simple and Pythonic solution is to use re.findall(pattern, string) with the inverse pattern used for splitting the list. If pattern A is used as a split pattern, everything that does not match pattern A can be used in the re.findall() function to essentially retrieve the split list.
Here’s the example that uses a negative character class [^-_\s]+ to find all characters that do not match the split pattern:
import re
s = '--hello-world_how are\tyou-----------today\t'
# Method 3: Use re.findall()
words = re.findall('([^-_\s]+)', s)
print(words)The result is the same split list:
['hello', 'world', 'how', 'are', 'you', 'today']
Where to Go From Here?
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