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 an algorithm that learns',
     'DFAs with correction equivalence queries.',
     'general procedure to check conjunctive query containment.']

I need to store it in the list as 'Separate words'

lines =  ['The','query', 'complexity' ,'of' ,'estimating', 'weighted','averages.'
     ,'New' ......]

How to obtain it as a list of separate words?

Answer 1

You can use a list comprehension:

>>> lines =  [
...     'The query complexity of estimating weighted averages.',
...     'New bounds for the query complexity of an algorithm that learns',
... ]
>>> [word for line in lines for word in line.split()]
['The', 'query', 'complexity', 'of', 'estimating', 'weighted','averages.', 'New', 'bounds', 'for', 'the', 'query', 'complexity', 'of', 'an', 'algorithm', 'that', 'learns']

Answer 2

You can join all lines and then use split():

" ".join(lines).split()

or you can split each line and chain:

from itertools import chain
list(chain(*map(str.split, lines)))

Answer 3

You can do it by:

import nltk
nltk.download('punkt')
from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize

lines =  ['The query complexity of estimating weighted averages.',
 'New bounds for the query complexity of an algorithm that learns',
 'DFAs with correction equivalence queries.',
 'general procedure to check conjunctive query containment.']

joint_words = ' '.join(lines)

separated_words = word_tokenize(joint_words)

print(separated_words)

Output will be :

['The', 'query', 'complexity', 'of', 'estimating', 'weighted', 'averages', '.', 'New', 'bounds', 'for', 'the', 'query', 'complexity', 'of', 'an', 'algorithm', 'that', 'learns', 'DFAs', 'with', 'correction', 'equivalence', 'queries', '.', 'general', 'procedure', 'to', 'check', 'conjunctive', 'query', 'containment', '.']

In addition, if you want to merge the dots with previous string (which appear as independent strings in the list), run the following code:

for i, j in enumerate(separated_words):
    if '.' in j:
        separated_words[i-1] = separated_words[i-1] + separated_words[i]
        del separated_words[i]    # For deleting duplicate entry

print(separated_words)

Output will be:

['The', 'query', 'complexity', 'of', 'estimating', 'weighted', 'averages.', 'New', 'bounds', 'for', 'the', 'query', 'complexity', 'of', 'an', 'algorithm', 'that', 'learns', 'DFAs', 'with', 'correction', 'equivalence', 'queries.', 'general', 'procedure', 'to', 'check', 'conjunctive', 'query', 'containment.']

Answer 4

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.