How to extract the first and final words from a string?

Question

I have a small problem with something I need to do in school...

My task is the get a raw input string from a user (text = raw_input()) and I need to print the first and final words of that string.

Can someone help me with that? I have been looking for an answer all day...

Solution 1

You have to firstly convert the string to list of words using str.split and then you may access it like:

>>> my_str = "Hello SO user, How are you"
>>> word_list = my_str.split()  # list of words

# first word  v              v last word
>>> word_list[0], word_list[-1]
('Hello', 'you')

From Python 3.x, you may simply do:

>>> first, *middle, last = my_str.split()

Solution 2

If you are using Python 3, you can do this:

text = input()
first, *middle, last = text.split()
print(first, last)

All the words except the first and last will go into the variable middle.

Solution 3

Let's say x is your input. Then you may do:

 x.partition(' ')[0]
 x.partition(' ')[-1]

Solution 4

You would do:

print text.split()[0], text.split()[-1]

Solution 5

Some might say, there is never too many answer's using regular expressions (in this case, this looks like the worst solutions..):

>>> import re
>>> string = "Hello SO user, How are you"
>>> matches = re.findall(r'^\w+|\w+$', string)
>>> print(matches)
['Hello', 'you']

View more solutions

Comments

[Moinuddin Quadri]

By final word do you mean last word? Please mention the sample example

[John Coleman]

Is the last word in "Hello World!" the string "World!" or the word "World" ?

[wildwilhelm]

partition will only chop x once (so, you'll get the first word, and then the rest of the sentence, not the last word).

[Moinuddin Quadri]

@wildwilhelm: There is a possibility that this answer is what OP expects as there is no clarity on the definition of final words. As a matter of doubt, answer should not be down-voted

[wildwilhelm]

True, I agree that the question wording is ambiguous. Downvote retracted.

[quapka]

Cool, first time I see this feature.

[Moinuddin Quadri]

Nice. If middle words were also required, it is very clean approach

[John Coleman]

This is nice, though it fails in the edge case of a 1-word sentence (where arguably that 1 word should be returned as both the first and the last word).

[PatrickT]

@JohnColeman, In this case, it errors out with ValueError: not enough values to unpack, which IMHO is a reasonable interpretation of "cannot split a word at a whitespace when such word does not have whitespace".

[Tomerikoo]

What's not clear about first and final? This answer will only give the first and second words, no the final if there are more than two words...