[SOLVED] [PYTHON] Split a string by every nth characters

recuse44 · 01-17-2011, 06:31 PM

Hi, I need some help splitting a string by every nth characters.
I'm using Python 2.7.1 because I'm using older libraries, if that matters.

For example, if this is my input:

Quote:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed ac elit nibh, vitae venenatis ligula. Vestibulum a varius turpis.

Splitting it by every 10th character should produce this list:

Quote:

[ "Lorem ipsu", "m dolor si", "t amet, co", "nsectetur ", "adipiscing", " elit. Sed", " ac elit n", "ibh, vitae", " venenatis", " ligula. V", "estibulum ", "a varius t", "urpis." ]

Any help would be appreciated

cin_ · 01-17-2011, 07:28 PM

What are you doing with the results?

Look into slices...http://docs.python.org/tutorial/introduction.html

bgeddy · 01-19-2011, 01:41 AM

Quote:

Hi, I need some help splitting a string by every nth characters.

As has been said, you should first look into string slicing and also list comprehensions will help to build your required list. This little bit of code does both and creates a function I've named split with takes the parameters of the string and a length to split into:

Code:

def split(input, size):
	return [input[start:start+size] for start in range(0, len(input), size)]
    
if __name__=="__main__":
	mystring="Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed ac elit nibh, vitae venenatis ligula. \
Vestibulum a varius turpis."
	print split(mystring, 10)

As you can see the function itself is just one line of python code the rest is a little test stub to see that the function works as expected - obviously by no means an exact unit test but it shows it works.

Quote:

I'm using Python 2.7.1 because I'm using older libraries, if that matters.

Well 2.7.1 is the latest release in the 2.x series - I would still advise anyone starting to stick with this series rather than the 3.x release - if only as there are still quite a lot of libraries not ported to 3.x yet.

recuse44 · 01-19-2011, 04:52 PM

Thanks for the answers, works great

I'm doing this to format my debug logs so that they are more readable.

cin_ · 01-20-2011, 03:34 AM

Sounds like a good project to start manipulating strings with python.

You can also check out cut(), it might have some functionality that would interest you...

Code:

# man cut
#

...great for piping...

Code:

# tail -n17 /var/log/messages | grep MARK | cut -c1-3,7-15,25,27,29-33
Jan 16:21:20 -MARK 
Jan 17:01:20 -MARK 
Jan 17:21:20 -MARK 
Jan 17:41:20 -MARK 
Jan 18:01:20 -MARK 
Jan 18:21:20 -MARK 
Jan 18:41:20 -MARK 
Jan 19:01:20 -MARK 
# tail -n4 /var/log/messages | grep MARK                             
Jan 19 16:21:20 cin_ -- MARK --
#