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I apologize if this is a duplicate but I can't seem to find anything out there that involves splitting a string based on a character count. For example, let's say I have the following string:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed ullamcorper, eros 
sed porta dapibus, nunc nibh iaculis tortor, in rhoncus quam orci sed ante. Sed 
ac dictum nibh.

Now, I can split the string based on a specific character, but how can I split this string after the nth character, regardless of what it is? Something like this, only with a working syntax is what I am thinking:

max_char = n #where n is the number of characters to split after
MyText = 'User input string. This is usually at least a paragraph long.'
char_count = len(MyText)
if char_count > max_char:
 #split string at max_char, create variables: MyText1 and MyText2

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Update

I wanted to post this update since my question only approached half of my problem. Thanks to Martijin's answer below I easily sliced the string above. However, since the string I was making edits to was user submitted, I ran into the problem of slicing words in half. In order to fix this problem, I used a combination of rsplit and rstrip to break up the paragraph correctly. Just in case someone out there is facing the same issues as me here is the code I used to make it work:

line1 = note[:36]
line2 = note[36:]

if not line1.endswith(' ', 1):
 line2_2 = line1.rsplit(' ')[-1]
 line1_1 = line1.rstrip(line2_2)
 line2_2 = line2_2 + line2
 line1 = ''
 line2 = ''

Now, I'm sure there is a more efficient/elegant way of doing this, but this still works so hopefully somebody can benefit from it. Thanks!

Dryden Long
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2 Answers2

5

You are looking for slicing:

MyText1, MyText2 = MyText[:max_char], MyText[max_char:]

Python strings are sequences, to select the first max_char characters, simply use a slice to select those, and for the second half select everything starting at max_char until the end.

This is covered in the Python tutorial as well.

Community
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Martijn Pieters
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2

Just to improve on your final solution: you can use string.find(' ', n) to find the index of the first space after character n. If you want to split after that space (so that string1 ends with a space, rather than string2 beginning with one), just add one to it:

>>> print string
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed ullamcorper, eros sed porta dapibus, nunc nibh iaculis tortor, in rhoncus quam orci sed ante. Sed
>>> space_location = string.find(' ', 36)+1
>>> print string[:space_location]
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur 
>>> print string[space_location:]
adipiscing elit. Sed ullamcorper, eros sed porta dapibus, nunc nibh iaculis tortor, in rhoncus quam orci sed ante. Sed
rkday
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