python find substrings based on a delimiter

Question

I am new to Python, so I might be missing something simple.

I am given an example:

 string = \"The , world , is , a , happy , place \" 

Answer 1

Simple thanks to the convenient string methods in Python:

print "\n".join(token.strip() for token in string.split(","))

Output:

The
world
is
a
happy
place

By the way, the word string is a bad choice for variable name (there is an string module in Python).

Answer 2

Strings have a split() method for this. It returns a list:

>>> string = "The , world , is , a , happy , place "
>>> string.split(' , ')
['The', 'world', 'is', 'a', 'happy', 'place ']

As you can see, there is a trailing space on the last string. A nicer way to split this kind of string would be this:

>>> [substring.strip() for substring in string.split(',')]
['The', 'world', 'is', 'a', 'happy', 'place']

.strip() strips whitespace off the ends of a string.

Use a for loop to print the words.

Answer 3

Another option:

import re

string = "The , world , is , a , happy , place "
match  = re.findall(r'[^\s,]+', string)
for m in match:
    print m

Output

The
world
is
a
happy
place

See a demo

You could also just use match = re.findall(r'\w+', string) and you will get the same output.

Answer 4

Try using the split function.

In your example:

string = "The , world , is , a , happy , place "
array = string.split(",")
for word in array:
    print word

Your approach failed because you indexed it to yield the string from beginning until the first ",". This could work if you then index it from that first "," to the next "," and iterate across the string that way. Split would work out much better though.