Question

I have data (below) with three different delimiters (the first has a space to the number, the second 3 spaces to the number and the final column a space and then a tab to the number) and I want to be able to generate a list containing sequential values from each column.

 8000.5   16745     0.1257
 8001.0   16745     0.1242
 8001.5   16745     0.1565
 8002.0   16745     0.1595
 8002.5   16745     0.1093
 8003.0   16745     0.1644

I tried some stuff with re. after converting to a string to see if I could parse it this way but it seemed a little bit long-winded to convert and I was wondering if anyone knew a quicker way. Ideal output would be

list 1 = [8000.5, 8001.0, 8001.5 ...]
list 2 = [16745, 16745, 16745, ...]
list 3 = [0.1257, 0.1242, 0.1565, ...]

Thanks!

Answer 1

Just use a .split(); it’ll take any amount of whitespace and split on that (ignoring leading and trailing whitespace altogether):

>>> ex = ' 8000.5   16745     0.1257'
>>> ex.split()
['8000.5', '16745', '0.1257']

If you need floats instead of strings, simply apply float() to each value using map:

>>> ex = ' 8000.5   16745     0.1257'
>>> map(float, ex.split())
[8000.5, 16745.0, 0.1257]