Let's suppose that I have a document like that:
document = ["This is a document\nwhich has to be splitted\nOK/Right?"]
and I would like to split this document (for start) wherever I encounter '\n' or '/'.
So the document above should be transformed to the following one:
document = ["This is a document", "which has to be splitted", "OK", "Right?"]
How can I do this?
Keep in mind that there may be other special characters etc in the text and I do not want to remove them for now.
Use re to split a string of text based on multiple characters or combinations of characters:
document = ["This is a document\nwhich has to be splitted\nOK/Right?"]
re.split("[\n/]",document[0])
which produces the requested strings:
['This is a document', 'which has to be splitted', 'OK', 'Right?']
This is a unique case where Regular Expressions shine!
Use Python's re module:
>>> import re
>>> document = ["This is a document\nwhich has to be splitted\nOK/Right?"]
>>> re.split(r"[\n/]", document[0])
['This is a document', 'which has to be splitted', 'OK', 'Right?']
This SO post has the most discussion on this topic
You can use re.split():
import re
def split_document(document):
if document == []:
return []
tmp_str = document[0]
tmp_list = re.split("\n|/",tmp_str)
return tmp_list+split_document(document[1:])
Using re.split() is probably the best solution.
An alternative solution without regular expressions:
document = ["This is a document\nwhich has to be splitted\nOK/Right?"]
document[0] = document[0].replace('/', '\n')
document[0].splitlines()
