Question

I have created a list that contains a different paragraph inside each element.

I want to find the first word of each paragraph.

The only thing I can come up with is to split each paragraph in to individual words and find element[0]. This seems fairly excessive as I already have each paragraph already in the list

So what is a better way to do this?

Answer 1

Something like this?

l = ['start of paragraph 1','start of paragraph 2','para 3']
first_words = [p.split()[0] for p in l]
print first_words

prints: [‘start’, ‘start’, ‘para’]

If you don’t want to split each paragraph, you could search for the index of the first space, and grab each word up to that:

l = ['start of paragraph 1','start of paragraph 2','para 3']
first_words = [p[:p.find(' ')] for p in l]
print first_words

prints: [‘start’, ‘start’, ‘para’]

Explanation as requested:

• find the first space in the paragraph with p.find(‘ ‘) – returns the position
• then take the first characters in the paragraph via p[:p.find(‘ ‘)]
• the remainder of that line is called a list comprehension and basically loops through your list and takes each paragraph, p in turn