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)
<type 'list'> # or <class 'list'> 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]

Answer 2

text.split()

This should be enough to store each word in a list. words is already a list of the words from the sentence, so there is no need for the loop.

Second, it might be a typo, but you have your loop a little messed up. If you really did want to use append, it would be:

words.append(word)

not

word.append(words)

Answer 3

str.split()

Return a list of the words in the string, using sep as the delimiter ... If sep is not specified or is None, a different splitting algorithm is applied: runs of consecutive whitespace are regarded as a single separator, and the result will contain no empty strings at the start or end if the string has leading or trailing whitespace.

>>> line="a sentence with a few words"
>>> line.split()
['a', 'sentence', 'with', 'a', 'few', 'words']
>>>