Determine whether there’s more than one word in a string

Question

For example:

line = 'how are you?'

if line == [has more than one word]: line.split()

Is this possible?

Solution 1

Try this:

line = 'how are you?'

if len(line.split()) > 1: # has more than 1 word

Solution 2

Getting the line.split() seems more pythonic, but if that was going to be an expensive operation, this might be faster:

if ' ' in 'how are you?': line.split()

Solution 3

line.strip().count(' ') > 0 # finds at least one separator after removing the spaces at the left and the right of the actual string

or if you really want speed

line.strip().find(' ') != -1 # not finding the ' ' character in the string

Comments

[Padraic Cunningham]

" foo " == True "foo " == True

[Ngenator]

It's 6x faster than line.count(' ') and 9x faster than if len(line.split()) in 2.7

[Padraic Cunningham]

you can have a space after a word and before a single word

[Jared Windover-Kroes]

Ooh good point! @Padraic. Depending on how you're getting the input, a lstrip and/or an rstrip could be prudent.

[Ry-]

.lstrip().rstrip() is just .strip(), and ' ' in line.strip() is easier.

[steveha]

This answer is best because it handles any kind of whitespace... it would also produce a correct result for "how\tare\tyou", which separates the words with tabs, for example.