Fetching elements from a list with spaces in between the string (Python) [duplicate]

Question

I am trying to write a function which can remove leading spaces and replace spaces in between the string with ',' and then split the string by ',' to individual elements.

split_entry = ['ENTRY', '      102725023         CDS       T01001']
res = []

def ws(list):
    for x in split_entry:
        entry_info = x.lstrip()                     #remove leading spaces at the start of string ('      102725023)
        entry_info = re.sub('\s+',', ',entry_info)  #replaces multiple spaces with ',' within a string
        if(re.search("^\d+",entry_info)):           #if element starts with digits '102725023'
            l = entry_info.split(", ", entry_info)                   #split by ','
            print (l[0])                            #get first element
            #return l[0]

ws(split_entry)

I would like to get the first element of the second list element (102725023 ). However I am getting following error while running above code.

TypeError: 'str' object cannot be interpreted as an integer

Any suggestions to resolve it. Thanks

Answer 1

You don't actually need to manually remove spaces your self - Python's split function can handle multiple spaces

After that, you can join the List to get a comma-separated string

a = 'fa     fdsa   f'
b = a.split()
print(b) # ['fa', 'fdsa', 'f']
print(",".join(b)) # 'fa,fdsa,f'

As for your code, there are a couple things:

• Don't name your variable or parameter list because it is a reserved keyword in Python
• In your ws function, you should use for x in parameterList, not explicitly stating split_entry

But honestly I am not entirely sure what exactly is wrong either.