Question

How do you substring in Python?

Asked by: jamie_lynn

Hi,
I have a address "Santa Mora, AZ 86444
I want to substring this string into city, state and zip but what is the best way to do this?
Do I use partition, rfind, or or split?
Thanks
Jamie

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Asked On
2007-10-01 at 23:49:24ID22865657
Tags

python

,

substring

Topic

Python Scripting Language

Participating Experts
3
Points
500
Comments
6

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Answers

 

by: ghostdog74Posted on 2007-10-02 at 00:11:16ID: 19996648

i assume this is only just one string, and that "Santa mora" is city, AZ is state, and the number after AZ is then

>>> s="Santa Mora, AZ 86444"
>>> splitted=s.split(",")
>>> splitted
['Santa Mora', ' AZ 86444']
>>> city=splitted[0]
>>> splitted2=splitted[1].split()
>>> splitted2
['AZ', '86444']
>>> state,zip=splitted2[0],splitted2[1]
>>> state,zip
('AZ', '86444')

 

by: peprPosted on 2007-10-02 at 00:48:09ID: 19996787

You can also take advantage of the multiple assignment command. If you are sure about the form of the addres, you can get rid of the temporary list name and of its indexing. The result may be more readable:

>>> s = 'Santa Mora, AZ 86444'
>>> city, XXzip = s.split(',')
>>> state, zip = XXzip.split()
>>> city
'Santa Mora'
>>> state
'AZ'
>>> zip
'86444'

If there are more complicated cases, regular expressions can be also good for extraction of the parts of the address string. However, do it without regular expression if it is easy to do it in the alternative way.

 

by: mish33Posted on 2007-10-02 at 00:59:54ID: 19996818

import re
city, state, zip = [i for i in re.split(r'[, ]', s) if i]

 

by: peprPosted on 2007-10-02 at 03:09:04ID: 19997224

mish33: You did not try it, do you? ;)

>>> city, state, zip = [i for i in re.split(r'[, ]', s) if i]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: too many values to unpack

The problem is that not every space is a separator. The split will do the following:

>>> lst = [i for i in re.split(r'[, ]', s) if i]
>>> lst
['Santa', 'Mora', 'AZ', '86444']

The usuall funny comment about using regular expressions holds ;)

 

by: peprPosted on 2007-10-02 at 03:20:41ID: 19997257

If you really want to use a regular expression for extracting the info, try something like that:

>>> import re
>>> s = 'Santa Mora, AZ 86444'
>>> rexAddress = re.compile(r'^\s*(?P<city>.+?)\s*,\s*(?P<state>[A-Z]+)\s*(?P<zip>\d+)\s*$')
>>> m = rexAddress.match(s)
>>> m
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x00D452F0>
>>> bool(m)
True
>>> m.group('city')
'Santa Mora'
>>> m.group('state')
'AZ'
>>> m.group('zip')
'86444'


However, it is not difficult to make an error in the regular expression...

 

by: jamie_lynnPosted on 2007-10-02 at 23:49:30ID: 20004416

Thanks everyone.   I did parse it, but I just wanted to know how everyone else did it to see if I parsed correctly.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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