Split python list objects separated by u' '

Question

I have a python list object containing elements as follows:

[u'Sentence 1 blabla.'],
[u'Sentence 2 blabla.'],
...

I want to extract the contents inside ' ' present in the list and store each as separate lines in a text file. Please help me with the same

Have you tried the normal text file IO? What have you tried? — cdarke, Feb 01 '17 at 07:53
I need to extract the string of each list element(sentences) enclosed in the ' ' quotes and then write to a file — Anu, Feb 01 '17 at 08:10
Possible duplicate of [Writing a list to a file with Python](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/899103/writing-a-list-to-a-file-with-python) — SiHa, Feb 01 '17 at 08:12
@Anu You **already have** those strings. No need to extract anything. — Stefan Pochmann, Feb 01 '17 at 08:38

Jithin Pavithran · Answer 1 · 2017-02-01T08:11:13.197

1

u'blablabla' is Unicode. You can convert it into string using str(unicode)

Example:

a = [[u'qweqwe'],[u'asdasd']]

str(a[0][0]) will be string qweqwe.
Now you can write it into file as usual.

Try this example for clarity:

a = [[u'qweqwe'],[u'asdasd']]
print type(a[0][0])
print type(str(a[0][0]))

Output:

<type 'unicode'>
<type 'str'>

edited Feb 01 '17 at 08:11

answered Feb 01 '17 at 08:06

Jithin Pavithran

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Thanks Jithin. I will try this out – Anu Feb 01 '17 at 08:11
@Anu, Upvote and/or accept the solution if found useful - makes it easy for others to pick the solution. Let comments be informative. – Jithin Pavithran Feb 01 '17 at 08:18

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 01 '17 at 08:11

Firstly, Given that you have a list of lists, I am going to assume that you are going to convert the given list from unicode to an UTF8 string. For this lets have a function convertList which takes a list of lists as an input

So your initial value for l would be

[[u'Sentence 1 blabla.'],
[u'Sentence 2 blabla.'],
...]

Notice that this is a list of lists. Now for each list item, loop through the items within that list and convert them all to UTF8.

def convertList(l):
    newlist = []
    for x in l:
        templ = [item.encode('UTF8') for item in x]
        newlist.append(templ)
    return newlist

l = [[u'Sentence 1 blabla.'], [u'Sentence 2 blabla.']]
l = convertList(l) # This updates the object you have
# Now do the filewrite operations here.
f = open('myfile.txt','w')
for iList in l:
    for items in iList:
        f.write(items+'\n')
f.close()

This will write to the file myfile.txt as follows

Sentence 1 blabla. Sentence 2 blabla.

Split python list objects separated by u' '

2 Answers2