[Tutor] str.split and quotes

[Marilyn Davis]

On Wed, 6 Apr 2005, Tony Meyer wrote:

> > >>> s = 'Hi "Python Tutors" please help'
> > >>> s.split()
> > ['Hi', '"Python', 'Tutors"', 'please', 'help']
> > >>> 
> > 
> > I wish it would leave the stuff in quotes in tact:
> > 
> > ['Hi', '"Python Tutors"', 'please', 'help']
> 
> You can do this with a regular expression:
> 
> >>> import re
> >>> re.findall(r'\".*\"|[^ ]+', s)
> ['Hi', '"Python Tutors"', 'please', 'help']
> 
> The regular expression says to find patterns that are either a quote (\")
> then any number of any characters (.*)then a quote (/") or (|) more than one
> of any character except a space ([^ ]).

Yes!  I'll do that.  Thank you, especially, for the explanation.

Thanks folks for all the suggestions.

Python attracts the best people!

Marilyn Davis

> 
> Or you can just join them back up again:
> 
> >>> combined = []
> >>> b = []
> >>> for a in s.split():
> ... 	if '"' in a:
> ... 		if combined:
> ... 			combined.append(a)
> ... 			b.append(" ".join(combined))
> ... 			combined = []
> ... 		else:
> ... 			combined.append(a)
> ... 	else:
> ... 		b.append(a)
> ... 		
> >>> b
> ['Hi', '"Python Tutors"', 'please', 'help']
> 
> (There are probably tidier ways of doing that).
> 
> Or you can do the split yourself:
> 
> def split_no_quotes(s):
>     index_start = 0
>     index_end = 0
>     in_quotes = False
>     result = []
>     while index_end < len(s):
>         if s[index_end] == '"':
>             in_quotes = not in_quotes
>         if s[index_end] == ' ' and not in_quotes:
>             result.append(s[index_start:index_end])
>             index_start = index_end + 1
>         index_end += 1
>     if s[-1] != ' ':
>         result.append(s[index_start:index_end])
>     return result
> 
> >>> print split_no_quotes(s)
> ['Hi', '"Python Tutors"', 'please', 'help']            
> 
> =Tony.Meyer
> 
> 

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