Split Strings into words with multiple word boundary delimiters

Question

I think what I want to do is a fairly common task but I\'ve found no reference on the web. I have text with punctuation, and I want a list of the words.

\"H         


        

Answer 1

In Python 3, your can use the method from PY4E - Python for Everybody.

We can solve both these problems by using the string methods lower, punctuation, and translate. The translate is the most subtle of the methods. Here is the documentation for translate:

your_string.translate(your_string.maketrans(fromstr, tostr, deletestr))

Replace the characters in fromstr with the character in the same position in tostr and delete all characters that are in deletestr. The fromstr and tostr can be empty strings and the deletestr parameter can be omitted.

Your can see the "punctuation":

In [10]: import string

In [11]: string.punctuation
Out[11]: '!"#$%&\'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\\]^_`{|}~'  

For your example:

In [12]: your_str = "Hey, you - what are you doing here!?"

In [13]: line = your_str.translate(your_str.maketrans('', '', string.punctuation))

In [14]: line = line.lower()

In [15]: words = line.split()

In [16]: print(words)
['hey', 'you', 'what', 'are', 'you', 'doing', 'here']

For more information, you can refer:

• PY4E - Python for Everybody
• str.translate
• str.maketrans
• Python String maketrans() Method