Python | Split String Get Element

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Summary: Use one of the following ways to split a string to get an element from a string:

Minimal Example

# Example 1
text = "Welcome to the world of Python!"
# Solution
res = text.split()
print("Split substrings: ", res)
print("Required Element: ", res[3])

# Alternate One line formulation
(res, ele) = (text.split(), text.split()[3])
print(f'Split substrings: {res}\nRequired Element: {ele}')

# Example 2
text = "cn=username,ou=group1,ou=group2,dc=domain1,dc=enterprise"
# Method 1: Using a For Loop
li = []
for pair in text.split(','):
    li.append(pair.split('=')[1])
print(li)
print('/'.join(li))

# Method 2: Using List Comprehension and join
result = [pair.split('=')[1] for pair in text.split(',')]
print(result)
print('/'.join(result))

# Method 3: Using regex
import re
print(re.sub(",.*?=", "/", text[3:]))

Problem Formulation

📜Problem: Given a string. How will split the string and get the element you want from the split string?

Example 1

Extract the word “world” from the given string.

# Input
text = "Welcome to the world of Python!"
# Output
Split substrings:  ['Welcome', 'to', 'the', 'world', 'of', 'Python!']
Required Element:  world

Example 2

# Input
text = "cn=username,ou=group1,ou=group2,dc=domain1,dc=enterprise"
# Output
['username', 'group1', 'group2', 'domain1', 'enterprise']
username/group1/group2/domain1/enterprise

This is a more complex scenario wherein you have to extract certain substrings from the given string and then combine the extracted substrings with a “/” in between to create a new string. Can you solve it?

Solution to Example 1

Method 1: Using split()

Approach: Split the string normally at the occurrence of a whitespace using the split method. To extract the required element from the list use its index within square brackets.

Code:

text = "Welcome to the world of Python!"
res = text.split()
print("Split substrings: ", res)
print("Required Element: ", res[3])

Output:

Split substrings:  ['Welcome', 'to', 'the', 'world', 'of', 'Python!']
Required Element:  world

One-Liner

You can formulate the above solution in a single line. You can do so by simply packing the required list and the required string into two variables in a single line.

Code:

text = "Welcome to the world of Python!"
(res, ele) = (text.split(), text.split()[3])
print(f'Split substrings: {res} \nRequired Element: {ele}')

Output:

Split substrings:  ['Welcome', 'to', 'the', 'world', 'of', 'Python!']
Required Element:  world

Solutions to Example 2

Method 1: Using a for Loop

Approach: Follow the explanation given below along with the illustrations to understand how to solve the given problem.

  • First split the given string using comma “,” as the delimiter and then use a for loop to iterate through each item of the list returned by the split method.
  • Go ahead and further split each item into two parts such that the second element of this list will be the word that we actually need in the final string. Store each word required in another list and then combine them to create a string using the join method. Use “/” as the joining link/string between each element.

Code:

text = "cn=username,ou=group1,ou=group2,dc=domain1,dc=enterprise"
# Method 1: Using a For Loop
li = []
for pair in text.split(','):
    li.append(pair.split('=')[1])
print(li)
print('/'.join(li))

Output:

['username', 'group1', 'group2', 'domain1', 'enterprise']
username/group1/group2/domain1/enterprise

Method 2: Using List Comprehension and Join

You can formulate the above solution in a more compact way by using a list comprehension. Use the list comprehension to split the string twice and store the required substrings in a list. Finally, join the items of list returned by the list comprehension using “/” as the join string within the join() method.

Code:

text = "cn=username,ou=group1,ou=group2,dc=domain1,dc=enterprise"
result = [pair.split('=')[1] for pair in text.split(',')]
print(result)
print('/'.join(result))

Output:

['username', 'group1', 'group2', 'domain1', 'enterprise']
username/group1/group2/domain1/enterprise

Method 3: Using regex

Yet another way to solve the problem is to use the sub method of the regex module. The pattern ",.*?=", " allows you to search all items that begin with a comma followed by any number of characters and then followed by an equals sign. Replace/substitute all the matches found with “/” character to deduce the final string.

Code:

import re

text = "cn=username,ou=group1,ou=group2,dc=domain1,dc=enterprise"
print(re.sub(",.*?=", "/", text[3:]))

Output:

username/group1/group2/domain1/enterprise

Recommended Read: Python Regex Sub

Conclusion

Well! That brings us to the end of this tutorial. We solved two different scenarios pertaining to the same problem. Feel free to opt the one that suits you.

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