Split String and get the first element using python


Split String and get the first element using python

In this post, we will discuss how to get the first element after we split a string into a list in python.

In Python, we can use the str.split() method with the maxsplit argument to split a string and get the first element from it. The maxsplit is set to 1 and use the index to fetch the item from the list. eg str.split('',1)[0].

The syntax of split() method is:

str.split(seperator, maxsplit)

seperator : this is the delimiter, that splits the string at the specified separator. The default is whitespace.

maxsplit : Specify the number of splits to be performed. default is -1, which means no limit.

Let's see an example to get the first element from the string.

Example:

str = 'Python is awesome'

firt_element = str.split(' ',1)[0]

print(first_element) //Python

We have used the ' ' (space) as the separator.

So, here we have set maxsplit to 1 which means the split()method will perform only one split.

str = 'Python is awesome'

str_split = str.split(' ',1)

print(str_split) // ['Python', 'is awesome']

And from the list we got the first element i.e "Python", using the index of it i.e 0 eg str.split(' ',1)[0]

Now if we a string have spaces at the beginning and the end of it. Then using maxsplit might give us an empty string as first character.

str = ' Python is awesome '

str_split = str.split(' ',1)[0]

print(str_split) // " "

To fix this we have to remove the whitespaces from the start and end of the string using the strip() method like this.

str = ' Python is awesome '

str_split = str.strip(' ').split(' ',1)[0]

print(str_split) // Python

The strip(' ') method removes the leading and trailing separator (here whitespace) from the string first and then split the string.

Related Topics:

How to split a list into multiple lists using python