Split by comma and strip whitespace in Python
I have some python code that splits on comma, but doesn't strip the whitespace:
>>> string = "blah, lots , of , spaces, here "
>>> mylist = string.split(',')
>>> print mylist
['blah', ' lots ', ' of ', ' spaces', ' here ']
I would rather end up with whitespace removed like this:
['blah', 'lots', 'of', 'spaces', 'here']
I am aware that I could loop through the list and strip() each item but, as this is Python, I'm guessing there's a quicker, easier and more elegant way of doing it.
Answer
Use list comprehension -- simpler, and just as easy to read as a for loop.
my_string = "blah, lots , of , spaces, here "
result = [x.strip() for x in my_string.split(',')]
# result is ["blah", "lots", "of", "spaces", "here"]
See: Python docs on List Comprehension
A good 2 second explanation of list comprehension.