string splitting

[William Manley]

first off, sorry for the horrible title.

I can't seem to think of a way to do this, so i was hoping to bounce the idea off of you guys.

I run a irc bot, and sometimes stuff gets cutoff due to strings being too long, so i was wondering if there is a good way to:

if a string X is longer then 300:
-- split it into strings smaller then 300 at the first whitespace after 260

any ideas? im completely stumped. Thanks.

[bartonc]

first off, sorry for the horrible title.

I can't seem to think of a way to do this, so i was hoping to bounce the idea off of you guys.

I run a irc bot, and sometimes stuff gets cutoff due to strings being too long, so i was wondering if there is a good way to:

if a string X is longer then 300:
-- split it into strings smaller then 300 at the first whitespace after 260

any ideas? im completely stumped. Thanks.

Sounds like a job for a regular expression. re objects (from the re module) have this method

split( pattern, string[, maxsplit = 0])

Split string by the occurrences of pattern. If capturing parentheses are used in pattern, then the text of all groups in the pattern are also returned as part of the resulting list. If maxsplit is nonzero, at most maxsplit splits occur, and the remainder of the string is returned as the final element of the list. (Incompatibility note: in the original Python 1.5 release, maxsplit was ignored. This has been fixed in later releases.)

which might do the trick after testing the length of the string and deciding what the value of maxplit is.

[William Manley]

Thanks, I'll start tinkering with this a bit.

[bvdet]

This is probably not the best way, but it seems to work:

def indexList(s, item, i=0, j=False):
    i_list = []
    while True:
        if j:
            if i > j: return i_list[:-1]
        try:
            i = s.index(item, i)
            i_list.append(i)
            i += 1
        except:
            return i_list
 
def split300(s):
    if len(s) <= 300: return [s]
    outList = []
    while True:
        try: 
            i = indexList(s,' ',j=300)[-1]
            outList.append(s[:i])
            s = s[i+1:]
        except: return outList

Using recursion:

def split300r(s):
    if len(s) <= 300: return [s]
    i = indexList(s,' ',j=300)[-1]
    return s[:i], split300r(s[i+1:])

[bvdet]

Using recursion:

def split300r(s):
    if len(s) <= 300: return [s]
    i = indexList(s,' ',j=300)[-1]
    return s[:i], split300r(s[i+1:])

Oops! The recursion function does not work correctly.

[bvdet]

Oops! The recursion function does not work correctly.

Maybe this will work:

def split300r(s):
    if len(s) <= 300: return [s]
    i = indexList(s,' ',j=300)[-1]
    return [s[:i]] + split300r(s[i+1:])