Question

Is it possible to split a string in python and assign each piece split off to a variable to be used later? I would like to be able to split by length if possible, but im not sure how it would work using len().

i tried this but its not getting me what i needed:

x = 'this is a string'
x.split(' ', 1)
print x

result:
[‘this’]

i want to result to something like this:

a = 'this'
b = 'is'
c = 'a'
d = 'string'

Answer 1

If you’d like to access a string 3 characters at a time, you’re going to need to use slicing.

You can get a list of the 3-character long pieces of the string using a list comprehension like this:

>>> x = 'this is a string'
>>> step = 3
>>> [x[i:i+step] for i in range(0, len(x), step)]
['thi', 's i', 's a', ' st', 'rin', 'g']
>>> step = 5
>>> [x[i:i+step] for i in range(0, len(x), step)]
['this ', 'is a ', 'strin', 'g']

The important bit is:

[x[i:i+step] for i in range(0, len(x), step)]

range(0, len(x), step) gets us the indices of the start of each step-character slice. for i in will iterate over these indices. x[i:i+step] gets the slice of x that starts at the index i and is step characters long.

If you know that you will get exactly four pieces every time, then you can do:

a, b, c, d = [x[i:i+step] for i in range(0, len(x), step)]

This will happen if 3 * step < len(x) <= 4 * step.

If you don’t have exactly four pieces, then Python will give you a ValueError trying to unpack this list. Because of this, I would consider this technique very brittle, and would not use it.

You can simply do

x_pieces = [x[i:i+step] for i in range(0, len(x), step)]

Now, where you used to access a, you can access x_pieces[0]. For b, you can use x_pieces[1] and so on. This allows you much more flexibility.