Check if space is in a string

Question

\' \' in word == True

I\'m writing a program that checks whether the string is a single word. Why doesn\'t this work and is there any better way to che

Answer 1

Write if " " in word: instead of if " " in word == True:.

Explanation:

• In Python, for example a < b < c is equivalent to (a < b) and (b < c).
• The same holds for any chain of comparison operators, which include in!
• Therefore ' ' in w == True is equivalent to (' ' in w) and (w == True) which is not what you want.

Answer 2

You can say word.strip(" ") to remove any leading/trailing spaces from the string - you should do that before your if statement. That way if someone enters input such as " test " your program will still work.

That said, if " " in word: will determine if a string contains any spaces. If that does not working, can you please provide more information?

Answer 3

There are a lot of ways to do that :

t = s.split(" ")
if len(t) > 1:
  print "several tokens"

To be sure it matches every kind of space, you can use re module :

import re
if re.search(r"\s", your_string):
  print "several words"

Answer 4

== takes precedence over in, so you're actually testing word == True.

>>> w = 'ab c'
>>> ' ' in w == True
1: False
>>> (' ' in w) == True
2: True

But you don't need == True at all. if requires [something that evalutes to True or False] and ' ' in word will evalute to true or false. So, if ' ' in word: ... is just fine:

>>> ' ' in w
3: True

Answer 5

You can try this, and if it will find any space it will return the position where the first space is.

if mystring.find(' ') != -1:
    print True
else:
    print False