How would we go about splitting a string in half in Python? Strings are one of the language’s most basic components. On a technical level, we can think of them as an array or list of unicode characters. But in a more utilitarian sense, we can think of strings as human readable language. For example, if you put a sentence from a book into Python code it’d be in the form of a very long Python string array.
The fact that strings are essentially treated as an array of characters makes it extremely easy to manipulate. After all, flexible and efficient array manipulation is one of the language’s strong points. So with that in mind, how would we go about splitting a string in half? For python split a string in half we should first take a look at how a string is defined and measured. We can begin with a longer word like caterpillar.
x = "caterpillar"
print(len(x))This shows how we can measure the length of a string variable, x, using the len split function. We can then see that the string value consists of eleven characters. You might notice that we find the length of an original string in the same way that we would an array. This is because the original string creation is essentially just a method of list comprehension. The given string value is a list of characters. We can proceed with a method to create a Python split string. This will produce two substring values which consist of the beginning and the end of the Python split string.
x = "caterpillar"
beginning, ending = x[:len(x)//2], x[len(x)//2:]
print(ending)But what if we wanted to try this on a full sentence without splitting any actual words in the middle? We could accomplish this with the following code. Keep in mind that this is the most illustrative way to use the split function on a given string variable in your data frame consisting of multiple words in half. We’d do things in a more concise manner in code that wasn’t meant to demonstrate methodology.
a = "Time to split this sentence in two"
aSplit = a.split()
aLength = len(aSplit)
b = round(aLength / 2)
newSplit = ""
for x in range(b):
newSplit = newSplit + " " +aSplit[x]
print(newSplit)In this example we first create a splitting string, a, that consists of a full sentence with multiple delimiters and a line break using a specified separator. We then use a special string method called split that’s inherent to the splitting string object type. This results in a list of words stored in the aSplit variable pattern. You might wonder how the split method predicts that we want to grab words instead of letters. This is due to the fact that split was called without any parameters.
The first variable passed to split as a parameter is used as the delimiter or separator. If no parameters are given, such as in this case, than split will use the whitespace character to split the input string element into multiple parts within an array.
Now we have all of the words in the a string method stored in a special character array called aSplit. But to split the string in half we’ll need to know what half of its length would be. We can find that by using a function called len to find the array’s length. We simply call len and store the results in aLength. Now we need to divide aLength by two in order to find the halfway point within the word list. We should also round the results to a whole number. We do this with the round function and then store the results in the b variable. Now we need to create an empty string called newSplit which will store half of the sentence.
Finally we create a loop which runs for the length of the b value. Remember that aSplit contains our full sentence in the form of a list. Every loop will copy a word from that list into the newSplit string. This results in a newly created split string that has half of the initial sentence found in a.
We could further extend this concept in some other useful ways in a Python program or object algorithm. For example, we could use a second parameter combination of isalnum and string concatenation to remove any given special character or specified separator from the initial strings column. Or we could use a regular expression based output matching for even more precise work on strings. However, in general the methods provided in these code samples are the foundation of string splitting in Python.