How do I split a sentence and store each word in a list? e.g.
"these are words" ⟶ ["these", "are", "words"]
To split on other delimiters, see Split a string by a delimiter in python.
To split into individual characters, see How do I split a string into a list of characters?.
Given a string sentence, this stores each word in a list called words:
words = sentence.split()
To split the string text on any consecutive runs of whitespace:
words = text.split()
To split the string text on a custom delimiter such as ",":
words = text.split(",")
The words variable will be a list and contain the words from text split on the delimiter.
Use str.split():
Return a list of the words in the string, using sep as the delimiter ... If sep is not specified or is
None, a different splitting algorithm is applied: runs of consecutive whitespace are regarded as a single separator, and the result will contain no empty strings at the start or end if the string has leading or trailing whitespace.
>>> line = "a sentence with a few words"
>>> line.split()
['a', 'sentence', 'with', 'a', 'few', 'words']
Depending on what you plan to do with your sentence-as-a-list, you may want to look at the Natural Language Took Kit. It deals heavily with text processing and evaluation. You can also use it to solve your problem:
import nltk
words = nltk.word_tokenize(raw_sentence)
This has the added benefit of splitting out punctuation.
Example:
>>> import nltk
>>> s = "The fox's foot grazed the sleeping dog, waking it."
>>> words = nltk.word_tokenize(s)
>>> words
['The', 'fox', "'s", 'foot', 'grazed', 'the', 'sleeping', 'dog', ',',
'waking', 'it', '.']
This allows you to filter out any punctuation you don't want and use only words.
Please note that the other solutions using string.split() are better if you don't plan on doing any complex manipulation of the sentence.
[Edited]
How about this algorithm? Split text on whitespace, then trim punctuation. This carefully removes punctuation from the edge of words, without harming apostrophes inside words such as we're.
>>> text
"'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'"
>>> text.split()
["'Oh,", 'you', "can't", 'help', "that,'", 'said', 'the', 'Cat:', "'we're", 'all', 'mad', 'here.', "I'm", 'mad.', "You're", "mad.'"]
>>> import string
>>> [word.strip(string.punctuation) for word in text.split()]
['Oh', 'you', "can't", 'help', 'that', 'said', 'the', 'Cat', "we're", 'all', 'mad', 'here', "I'm", 'mad', "You're", 'mad']
I want my python function to split a sentence (input) and store each word in a list
The str().split() method does this, it takes a string, splits it into a list:
>>> the_string = "this is a sentence"
>>> words = the_string.split(" ")
>>> print(words)
['this', 'is', 'a', 'sentence']
>>> type(words)
<type 'list'> # or <class 'list'> in Python 3.0
If you want all the chars of a word/sentence in a list, do this:
print(list("word"))
# ['w', 'o', 'r', 'd']
print(list("some sentence"))
# ['s', 'o', 'm', 'e', ' ', 's', 'e', 'n', 't', 'e', 'n', 'c', 'e']
shlex has a .split() function. It differs from str.split() in that it does not preserve quotes and treats a quoted phrase as a single word:
>>> import shlex
>>> shlex.split("sudo echo 'foo && bar'")
['sudo', 'echo', 'foo && bar']
NB: it works well for Unix-like command line strings. It doesn't work for natural-language processing.
If you want to split a string into a list of words and if the string has punctuations, it's probably advisable to remove them. For example, str.split() the following string as
s = "Hi, these are words; these're, also, words."
words = s.split()
# ['Hi,', 'these', 'are', 'words;', "these're,", 'also,', 'words.']
where Hi,, words;, also, etc. have punctuation attached to them. Python has a built-in string module that has a string of punctuations as an attribute (string.punctuation). One way to get rid of the punctuations is to simply strip them from each word:
import string
words = [w.strip(string.punctuation) for w in s.split()]
# ['Hi', 'these', 'are', 'words', "these're", 'also', 'words']
another is make a comprehensive dictionary of the strings to remove
table = str.maketrans('', '', string.punctuation)
words = s.translate(table).split()
# ['Hi', 'these', 'are', 'words', 'thesere', 'also', 'words']
It doesn't handle words like these're, so it handle that case nltk.word_tokenize could be used as tgray suggested. Only, filter out the words that consist entirely of punctuation.
import nltk
words = [w for w in nltk.word_tokenize(s) if w not in string.punctuation]
# ['Hi', 'these', 'are', 'words', 'these', "'re", 'also', 'words']
Split the words without without harming apostrophes inside words Please find the input_1 and input_2 Moore's law
def split_into_words(line):
import re
word_regex_improved = r"(\w[\w']*\w|\w)"
word_matcher = re.compile(word_regex_improved)
return word_matcher.findall(line)
#Example 1
input_1 = "computational power (see Moore's law) and "
split_into_words(input_1)
# output
['computational', 'power', 'see', "Moore's", 'law', 'and']
#Example 2
input_2 = """Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."""
split_into_words(input_2)
#output
['Oh',
'you',
"can't",
'help',
'that',
'said',
'the',
'Cat',
"we're",
'all',
'mad',
'here',
"I'm",
'mad',
"You're",
'mad']
