How Do I Split A Very Long String Into A List Of Shorter Strings In Python

In my current django project I have a model that stores very long strings (can be 5000-10000 or even more characters per DB entry) and then i need to split them when a user is call

Solution 1:

>>> s = "This is a very long string with many many many many and many more sentences and there is not one character that i can use to split by, just by number of words">>> l = s.split()
>>> n = 5>>> [' '.join(l[x:x+n]) for x in xrange(0, len(l), n)]
['This is a very long',
 'string with many many many',
 'many and many more sentences',
 'and there is not one',
 'character that i can use',
 'to split by, just by',
 'number of words']

Solution 2:

Here is an idea:

def split_chunks(s, chunksize):
    pos = 0while(pos != -1):
        new_pos = s.rfind(" ", pos, pos+chunksize)
        if(new_pos == pos):
            new_pos += chunksize # force split in word
        yield s[pos:new_pos]
        pos = new_pos

This tries to split strings into chunks at most chunksize in length. It tries to split at spaces, but if it can't it splits in the middle of a word:

>>> foo = "asdf qwerty sderf sdefw regf">>> list(split_chunks(foo, 6)
['asdf', ' qwert', 'y', ' sderf', ' sdefw', ' regf', '']

I guess it requires some tweaking though (for instance how to handle splits that occur inside words), but it should give you a starting point.

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To split by number of words, do this:

def split_n_chunks(s, words_per_chunk):
    s_list = s.split()
    pos = 0whilepos < len(s_list):
        yield s_list[pos:pos+words_per_chunk]
        pos += words_per_chunk