Question

I have a form with:

<textarea name="test">

Assuming the user inputs the following text:

This is the first paragraph
It has two lines

This is the second paragraph

I would like to split this text into a list [“This is the first paragraph\nIt has two lines”, “This is the second paragraph”]

I thought this would work:

temp = self.request.get("test")
list = re.split(r'\n\n', temp)

But it does not. However,

temp = self.request.get("test")
list = re.split(r'\n', temp)

yields the following list: [“This is the first line”, “”, “This is the second line”]

What am I missing?

ALSO:

Assuming there could be either one or two empty lines between the to texts, would this make sense?

temp = self.request.get("test")
list = re.split(r'(\n){2,3}', temp)

SOLUTION:

With the help below,

I’ve found out that the following code works in my case:

temp = self.request.get("test")
list = [l for l in temp.split('\r\n\r\n') if l.split()]

I think the line-breaking might depend on what system the input comes from, so it might not be the perfect solution.

Answer 1

I think re module might be overkill. Just split the content by \n and remove the empty strings.

>>> s = """This is the text
... 
... I am interested in splitting,
... 
... 
... but I want to remove blank lines!"""
>>> lines = [l for l in s.split("\n") if l]
>>> lines
['This is the text', 'I am interested in splitting,', 'but I want to remove blank lines!']

The string.split also appears to be about twice as fast.

> python -m timeit -s 's = "This is the text\n\nthat I want to split\n\n\nand remove empty lines"; import re;' '[l for l in re.split(r"\n", s) if l]'   
100000 loops, best of 3: 2.84 usec per loop

> python -m timeit -s 's = "This is the text\n\nthat I want to split\n\n\nand remove empty lines"' '[l for l in s.split("\n") if l]'                    
1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.08 usec per loop