Python | Split String by Whitespace – Be on the Right Side of Change

Summary: Use "given string".split() to split the given string by whitespace and store each word as an individual item in a list.

Minimal Example:

print("Welcome Finxter".split())
# OUTPUT: ['Welcome', 'Finxter']

Problem Formulation

💬 Problem: Given a string, How will you split the string into a list of words using whitespace as a separator/delimiter?

Let’s understand the problem with the help of a few examples:

Example 1

Split the string into a list of words using a space ” ” as the delimiter to separate the words from the given string.

# Input:
text = "Welcome to the world of Python"

# Output:
['Welcome', 'to', 'the', 'world', 'of', 'Python']

Example 2

Split the string into a list of words using a newline "\n" as the delimiter to separate the words from the given string.

# Input:
text = """Item_1
Item_2
Item_3"""

# Output:
['Item_1', 'Item_2', 'Item_3']

Example 3

The given string contains a combination of whitespaces between the words, such as space, multiple spaces, a tab, and a new line character.

All of these whitespace characters have to be considered delimiters while separating the words from the given string and storing them as items in a list.

# Input:
text = "This is  just a random    text:\n New Line"

# Output:
['This', 'is', 'just', 'a', 'random', 'text:', 'New', 'Line']

So, we have two situations at hand.

You have a single whitespace used as a delimiter, and
You have multiple whitespace characters as delimiters in the same string.

Let’s dive into the numerous ways of solving this problem.

Method 1: Using split()

Python’s built-in method split() splits the string at a given separator and returns a split list of substrings.

Here’s a minimal example that demonstrates how the split function works:

finxterx42'.split('x')

will split the string with the character ‘x’ as the delimiter and return the following list as an output:

['fin', 'ter', '42'].

The default separator, i.e., when no value is passed to the split function is considered as any whitespace character, i.e., it will take into account any whitespace such as '\n', " ", '\t', etc.

🌍 Recommended Tutorial: Read more about the split() method in this blog tutorial: Python String split().

Approach: Thus, to split a string based on a given whitespace delimiter, you can simply pass the specific whitespace character as a separator/delimiter to the split('whitespace_character') function.

Code:

# Example 1:
text = "Welcome to the world of Python"
print(text.split(' '))
# OUTPUT: ['Welcome', 'to', 'the', 'world', 'of', 'Python']

# Example 2:
text = """Item 1
Item 2
Item 3"""
print(text.split('\n'))
# OUTPUT: ['Item_1', 'Item_2', 'Item_3']

# Example 3: 
text = "This is just a\trandom text:\nNew Line"
print(text.split()) 
# OUTPUT: ['This', 'is', 'just', 'a', 'random', 'text:', 'New', 'Line']

Note that to separate the words in the third example, we did specify any separator within the split() function.

This is because when you don’t specify the separator, then Python will automatically consider that any whitespace character that occurs within the given string is a separator.

Method 2: Using regex

Another extremely handy way of separating a string with whitespace characters as separators is to use the regex library.

Approach 1: Import the regex library and use its split method as re.split('\s+', text) where '\s+' returns a match whenever the string contains one or more whitespace characters.

Therefore, whenever any whitespace character is encountered, the string will be separated at that point.

Code:

import re
# Example 1:
text = "Welcome to the world of Python"
print(re.split('\s+', text))
# OUTPUT: ['Welcome', 'to', 'the', 'world', 'of', 'Python']

# Example 2:
text = """Item_1
Item_2
Item_3"""
print(re.split('\s+', text))
# OUTPUT: ['Item_1', 'Item_2', 'Item_3']

# Example 3:
text = "This is just a\trandom text:\nNew Line"
print(re.split('\s+', text))
# OUTPUT: ['This', 'is', 'just', 'a', 'random', 'text:', 'New', 'Line']

Related Tutorial: Python Regex Split

Approach 2: Another way of using the regex library to solve this question is to use the findall() method of the regex library.

Import the regex library and use re.findall(r'\S+', text) where the expression returns all the characters/words in a list that do not contain any whitespace character.

This essentially means that whenever Python finds and segregates a string that has no whitespace in it.

As soon as a whitespace character is found it considers that as a breakpoint, therefore the next word that has a continuous sequence of characters without the presence of any whitespace character is taken into account.

Here’s a graphical representation of the above explanaton:

Code:

import re
# Example 1:
text = "Welcome to the world of Python"
print(re.findall(r'\S+', text))
# OUTPUT: ['Welcome', 'to', 'the', 'world', 'of', 'Python']

# Example 2:
text = """Item_1
Item_2
Item_3"""
print(re.findall(r'\S+', text))
# OUTPUT: ['Item_1', 'Item_2', 'Item_3']

# Example 3:
text = "This is   just a    random text:\n New Line"
print(re.findall(r'\S+', text))
# OUTPUT: ['This', 'is', 'just', 'a', 'random', 'text:', 'New', 'Line']

🌍 Related Tutorial: Python re.findall() – Everything You Need to Know

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Conclusion

We have successfully solved the given problem using different approaches. I hope you enjoyed this article and it helps you in your Python coding journey. Please subscribe and stay tuned for more interesting articles!

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