Extracting information from a string in Python

Question

My .csv data looks like this:

June 8, 2009 Monday
June 8, 2009 Monday
June 6, 2009 Saturday
June 6, 2009 Saturday Correction Appended
June 6, 2009 Saturday
June 6, 2009 Saturday
June 6, 2009 Saturday
etc...

The data spans 10 years. I need to separate the months and years (and don't care about the dates and days).

To single out months I have the next lines of code:

for row in reader:
 date = row[1]
 month = date.partition(' ')[0]
 print month 

However I can't figure out how to extract the numeric year from the string? Would I have to use regex for this?

• Nagaraj Tantri: If your month is June 6, then you can get 6 by month.split(" ")[1]
• thodic: @TheMonk OP wants to extract "the numeric year"
• Nagaraj Tantri: @OhAuth Was in a hurry and glanced the same. Good catch. _/

Answer 1

Try:

for row in reader:
 row_split = row[1].split()
 month = row_split[0]
 year = int(row_split[3])

---

Explaination

row[1] == "June 8, 2009 Monday"

Therefore:

row[1].split() == ["June", "8,", "2009", "Monday"]

So, your month and year are extracted as follows:

• "June" == row[1].split()[0]
• 2009 == int(row[1].split()[2])

• bereal: Shouldn't both be [0]?
• thodic: @bereal There is a space at the start of the second column. If OPs data is truly comma separated this adds a blank string at the start of the split array. See the edit explanation.
• bereal: ' a b c '.split() returns ['a', 'b', 'c'], unlike ' a b c '.split(' ')
• thodic: @bereal I originally had split(' '), however, a suggested edit changed it to split(). Needless to say I've fixed the issue from the suggested edit in my answer. +1 for the tip.
• Zlo: Thanks for the explanation, but actually the data format I provided above is already extracted from row[1] in the .csv. So row[1] contains the full string e.g., June 6, 2009 Saturday Correction Appended.