How to split a string into a list?

Question

I want my Python function to split a sentence (input) and store each word in a list. My current code splits the sentence, but does not store the words as a list. How do I do

Answer 1

I want my python function to split a sentence (input) and store each word in a list

The str().split() method does this, it takes a string, splits it into a list:

>>> the_string = "this is a sentence"
>>> words = the_string.split(" ")
>>> print(words)
['this', 'is', 'a', 'sentence']
>>> type(words)
 # or  in Python 3.0

The problem you're having is because of a typo, you wrote print(words) instead of print(word):

Renaming the word variable to current_word, this is what you had:

def split_line(text):
    words = text.split()
    for current_word in words:
        print(words)

..when you should have done:

def split_line(text):
    words = text.split()
    for current_word in words:
        print(current_word)

If for some reason you want to manually construct a list in the for loop, you would use the list append() method, perhaps because you want to lower-case all words (for example):

my_list = [] # make empty list
for current_word in words:
    my_list.append(current_word.lower())

Or more a bit neater, using a list-comprehension:

my_list = [current_word.lower() for current_word in words]