Reading a text file and splitting it into single words in python

by

Given this file:

$ cat words.txt
line1 word1 word2
line2 word3 word4
line3 word5 word6

If you just want one word at a time (ignoring the meaning of spaces vs line breaks in the file):

with open('words.txt','r') as f:
    for line in f:
        for word in line.split():
           print(word)

Prints:

line1
word1
word2
line2
...
word6

Similarly, if you want to flatten the file into a single flat list of words in the file, you might do something like this:

with open('words.txt') as f:
    flat_list=[word for line in f for word in line.split()]

>>> flat_list
['line1', 'word1', 'word2', 'line2', 'word3', 'word4', 'line3', 'word5', 'word6']

Which can create the same output as the first example with print '\n'.join(flat_list)…

Or, if you want a nested list of the words in each line of the file (for example, to create a matrix of rows and columns from a file):

with open('words.txt') as f:
    matrix=[line.split() for line in f]

>>> matrix
[['line1', 'word1', 'word2'], ['line2', 'word3', 'word4'], ['line3', 'word5', 'word6']]

If you want a regex solution, which would allow you to filter wordN vs lineN type words in the example file:

import re
with open("words.txt") as f:
    for line in f:
        for word in re.findall(r'\bword\d+', line):
            # wordN by wordN with no lineN

Or, if you want that to be a line by line generator with a regex:

 with open("words.txt") as f:
     (word for line in f for word in re.findall(r'\w+', line))

More Related Contents:

  1. Split string every nth character?
  2. Split string with multiple delimiters in Python [duplicate]
  3. Split a string by a delimiter in python
  4. Split string on whitespace in Python [duplicate]
  5. How to split a string of space separated numbers into integers?
  6. Why are empty strings returned in split() results?
  7. Splitting a string into words and punctuation
  8. How to split strings into text and number?
  9. Product code looks like abcd2343, how to split by letters and numbers?
  10. Get last “column” after .str.split() operation on column in pandas DataFrame
  11. Splitting a semicolon-separated string to a dictionary, in Python
  12. Splitting on last delimiter in Python string?
  13. Python split string into multiple string [duplicate]
  14. When splitting an empty string in Python, why does split() return an empty list while split(‘\n’) returns [”]?
  15. Splitting a string by list of indices
  16. Split a string only by first space in python
  17. How to split strings inside a list by whitespace characters
  18. Convert string to list. Python [string.split() acting weird]
  19. How would I get everything before a : in a string Python
  20. Python regex: splitting on pattern match that is an empty string
  21. Convert list of strings to dictionary
  22. Is there a way to split a string by every nth separator in Python?
  23. How can I split a string of a mathematical expressions in python?
  24. How to split a Python string on new line characters [duplicate]
  25. Split string at nth occurrence of a given character
  26. Split text after the second occurrence of character
  27. Split a string into 2 in Python
  28. How can I split by 1 or more occurrences of a delimiter in Python?
  29. Python split string in moving window
  30. Splitting a math expression string into tokens in Python

Leave a Comment