Question

I feel like this is a really simple question,
but I need help figuring out.

So, I have the following:

str = 'hello world'
str.split()  # ['hello','world']

I want to index ‘world’ but str[1] returns ‘e’, which is the second character in the list.
How do I index by word instead of character?

Please help me out and thank you in advance.

(Please don’t tell me to do str[5:]… I wanna know how to index words in general)

Answer 1

You need to index the result of my_str.split():

my_str = "hello world"
words = my_str.split()
print words[1]

(Renamed the variable to my_str to avoid shadowing the built-in.)

Note that my_str.split() does not change my_str in any way. String objects are immutable in Python and can’t be changed. Instead, my_str.split() returns a list of strings that can be indexed.