Add characters (',') every time a certain character ( , )is encountered ? Python 2.7.3

Question

Let's say you had a string

test = 'wow, hello, how, are, you, doing'

and you wanted

full_list = ['wow','hello','how','are','you','doing']

i know you would start out with an empty list:

empty_list = []

and would create a for loop to append the items into a list

i'm just confused on how to go about this,

I was trying something along the lines of:

for i in test:
 if i == ',':

then I get stuck . . .

• Matthew Trevor: This is a dupe: stackoverflow.com/questions/5453026/string-to-list-in-python
• user2665694: Upvotes for a question already asked a dozen times without having done any research?

Answer 1

In Python, the nicest way to do what you want is

full_list = test.split(', ')

If your string might have some commas that aren't followed by spaces, you would need to do something a little more robust. Maybe

full_list = [x.lstrip() for x in test.split(',')]

• minopret: Perhaps tack .lstrip() on the end to remove the spaces that follow the commas.

Answer 2

>>> test = 'wow, hello, how, are, you, doing'
>>> full_list = test.replace(",","','")
>>> print full_list
wow',' hello',' how',' are',' you',' doing

i just added the flanking quotations manually

• John La Rooy: This is a string that looks a bit like the string representation of a list. A list is a very different thing to a string
• Pierre GM: Agreeing w/ @gnibbler : this answer has little to do with the question, -1.