Question

I have several strings with phrases or words separated by multiple spaces.

c1 = "St. Louis       12             Cardinals"
c2 = "Boston          16             Red Sox"
c3 = "New York        13             Yankees"

How do I write a function perhaps using the python split(" ") function to separate each line into an array of strings? For instance, c1 would go to ['St. Louis', '12', 'Cardinals'].

Calling split(" ") and then trimming the component entities won’t work because some entities such as St. Louis or Red Sox have spaces in them.

However, I do know that all entities are at least 2 spaces apart and that no entity has 2 spaces within it. By the way, I actually have around 100 cities to deal with, not 3. Thanks!

Answer 1

Without regular expressions:

c1 = "St. Louis       12             Cardinals"
words = [w.strip() for w in c1.split('  ') if w]
# words == ['St. Louis', '12', 'Cardinals']