Counting sub-element in string?

Question

Say I have a string = "Nobody will give me pancakes anymore"

I want to count each word in the string. So I do string.split() to get a list in order to get ['Nobody', 'will', 'give', 'me', 'pancakes', 'anymore'].

But when I want to know the length of 'Nobody' by inputing len(string[0]) it only gives me 1, because it thinks that the 0th element is just 'N' and not 'Nobody'.

What do I have to do to ensure I can find the length of the whole word, rather than that single element?

So store the string.split() result in a new variable, and take the length of the first element of that. — Martijn Pieters
– Martijn Pieters, Commented Oct 15, 2016 at 21:54
@MartijnPieters I'm trying that but I get SyntaxError: can't assign to function call — Stefan
– Stefan, Commented Oct 15, 2016 at 21:56
sounds like you got the syntax for assigning wrong somewhere then. See my answer. — Martijn Pieters
– Martijn Pieters, Commented Oct 15, 2016 at 21:57

Martijn Pieters · Accepted Answer · 2016-10-15 21:54:51Z

4

You took the first letter of string[0], ignoring the result of the string.split() call.

Store the split result; that's a list with individual words:

words = string.split()
first_worth_length = len(words[0])

Demo:

>>> string = "Nobody will give me pancakes anymore"
>>> words = string.split()
>>> words[0]
'Nobody'
>>> len(words[0])
6

answered Oct 15, 2016 at 21:54

Martijn Pieters

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1 Comment

Stefan Over a year ago

Oh I got it now! I didn't put the variable in order. Thank a lot!

OneCricketeer · Accepted Answer · 2016-10-15 21:58:40Z

1

Yup, string[0] is just 'N'

Regarding your statement...

I want to count each word in the string

>>> s = "Nobody will give me pancakes anymore"
>>> lens = map(lambda x: len(x), s.split())
>>> print lens
[6, 4, 4, 2, 8, 7]

So, then you can do lens[0]

answered Oct 15, 2016 at 21:58

OneCricketeer

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Comments

score 0 · Accepted Answer · 2016-10-16 17:09:31Z

0

words = s.split()   
d = {word : len(word) for word in words}

or

words = s.split()
d = {}

for word in words:
    if word not in d:
        d[word]=0
    d[word]+=len(word)

In [15]: d  
Out[15]: {'me': 2, 'anymore': 7, 'give': 4, 'pancakes': 8, 'Nobody': 6,   'will': 4}
In [16]: d['Nobody']
Out[16]: 6

edited Oct 16, 2016 at 17:09

answered Oct 15, 2016 at 22:41

user5213304

2 Comments

OneCricketeer Over a year ago

So, d = {word : len(word) for word in words}? Why the defaultdict?

user5213304 Over a year ago

Thanks I was trying to write it in a more readable way. I have changed the answer thanks very much for the suggestion.

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