Using len for text but discarding spaces in the count

Question

So, I am trying to create a program which counts the number of characters in a string which the user inputs, but I want to discard any spaces that the user enters.

Answer 1

You can also do

sum(1 for c in s if c!=' ') 

Which avoids any unnecessary temporary string or list.

Answer 2

Use sum with a generator expression:

>>> text = 'foo  bar  spam'
>>> sum(len(x) for x in text.split())
10

Or str.translate with len:

>>> from string import whitespace
>>> len(text.translate(None, whitespace)) #Handles all types of whitespace characters
10

Answer 3

Why can't you just do:

>>> mystr = input("Please enter in a full name: ")
Please enter in a full name: iCodez wrote this
>>> len(mystr.replace(" ", ""))
15
>>> len(mystr)
17
>>>

This gets the length of the string minus the spaces.

Answer 4

I can propose a few versions.

You can replace each space with an empty string and calculate the length:

len(mystr.replace(" ", ""))

You can calculate the length of the whole string and subtract the number of spaces:

len(mystr) - mystr.count(' ')

Or you can sum the lengths of all substrings after splitting the string with spaces:

sum(map(len, mystr.split(' ')))

Answer 5

To count the number of characters excluding spaces, you can simply do:

>>> full_name = "John DOE"
>>> len(full_name) - full_name.count(' ')
7

Answer 6

Count the length and subtract the number of spaces:

>>> full_name = input("Please enter in a full name: ")
Please enter in a full name: john smith
>>> len(full_name) - full_name.count(' ')
9
>>> len(full_name)