splitting a list of sentences into separate words in a list

Question

I have a list which consists of lines as

lines =  [\'The query complexity of estimating weighted averages.\',
     \'New bounds for the query complexity of a         


        

Answer 1

It sounds like you want something similar to this where a string is split based on whitespace:

lines[0].split()

The above would split your lines list (which seems to contain 1 item) using the whitespace in that string.