Selecting first word of a variable

[Boblert]

How do I select the first word of a variable?

name = raw_input("What's your full name? ")
print "Hey, %s, how you doing?" % name

So say I only wanted it to print the first name? How would I do this not knowing the amount of letters in it?

[bartonc]

How do I select the first word of a variable?

name = raw_input("What's your full name? ")
print "Hey, %s, how you doing?" % name

So say I only wanted it to print the first name? How would I do this not knowing the amount of letters in it?

>>> name = "Jo Shcmo"
>>> firstandlast = name.split()
>>> firstname = firstandlast[0]
>>> firstname
'Jo'
>>> 

[Boblert]

Thanks alot,
also how would I create a function to replace but only if its the whole words for example:

Replace:
man : guy

Sentence to be replaced:
That man is good but he ain't no superman.

But I can only get it to replace as:
That guy is good but he ain't no superguy.

But I want it to replace as:
The guy is good but he ain't no superman.


Sorry if that my problem is confusing its hard to explain

[ilikepython]

Thanks alot,
also how would I create a function to replace but only if its the whole words for example:

Replace:
man : guy

Sentence to be replaced:
That man is good but he ain't no superman.

But I can only get it to replace as:
That guy is good but he ain't no superguy.

But I want it to replace as:
The guy is good but he ain't no superman.


Sorry if that my problem is confusing its hard to explain

Try something like this:

sent = "That man is good but he ain't no superman."
words = sent.split()
 
for (i, word) in enumerate(words):
    if word == "man":
        words[i] = "guy"
 
newsent = " ".join(words)
 

You could also use the re module.

[Boblert]

Ye, thats what I've been doing. But it is a large word-replace list and large paragraph.
Just thought there might of been a way with less lines used :D
and I don't quite understand the re module

[ilikepython]

Ye, thats what I've been doing. But it is a large word-replace list and large paragraph.
Just thought there might of been a way with less lines used :D
and I don't quite understand the re module

If you have more than one word you can do something like this (don't know if you did it already) ;):

replacedict = {"man": "guy", "woman": "girl", "car": "automobile"} # etc...
 
for i in range(len(paragraph)):
    if paragraph[i] in replacedict.keys():
        paragraph[i] = replacedict[paragraph[i]]
 

Technically, that uses the same amount of lines.

[Boblert]

Thanks alot thats solved my problem :D

[bartonc]

Ye, thats what I've been doing. But it is a large word-replace list and large paragraph.
Just thought there might of been a way with less lines used :D
and I don't quite understand the re module

A Regular Expression (re), has it's own language. A VERY simple example would be a sub-string followed by any whitespace (pure Python could easily do this to, but "regex"s, as they are called go much further):

>>> import re
>>> s = "That man is good but he ain't no superman"
>>> reObj = re.compile("man\s")
>>> reObj.sub("guy ", s)
"That guy is good but he ain't no superman"
>>> 

Just thought I'd throw that out there.

[ghostdog74]

Thanks alot,
also how would I create a function to replace but only if its the whole words for example:

Replace:
man : guy

Sentence to be replaced:
That man is good but he ain't no superman.

But I can only get it to replace as:
That guy is good but he ain't no superguy.

But I want it to replace as:
The guy is good but he ain't no superman.


Sorry if that my problem is confusing its hard to explain

read the docs for replace() more carefully. The docs are your good friend.

>>> "This man is a superman".replace("man","guy",1)
'This guy is a superman'
>>> "This man is a superman".replace("man","guy")
'This guy is a superguy'
>>> 
 

[bartonc]

read the docs for replace() more carefully. The docs are your good friend.

>>> "This man is a superman".replace("man","guy",1)
'This guy is a superman'
>>> "This man is a superman".replace("man","guy")
'This guy is a superguy'
>>> 
 

"superguy", that's a good one!