How To Convert Comma-Delimited String To A List In Python

A comma-delimited string is nothing but a string separated by commas. In Python, we can make use of in-built functions to separate a string based on a comma or some other delimiter and create a list with each separated value as the list item. In today’s post, we will look at the multiple ways in which we can convert a comma-delimited string to a list in Python.

Convert Comma-Delimited String to a List in Python

Below are some of the ways by which we can convert comma-delimited string to a list in Python:

• Using the string.split() method
• Using List Comprehension
• Using re module of Python

Convert Comma-Delimited String to a List Using string.split() method

The split() method of Python takes a delimiter like a comma as an argument and based on the delimiter, splits a string into a list. If no delimiter is provided, it splits the string on the basis of whitespaces.

Python3

#string
cars = "Porsche, G Wagon, Mercedes, Audi, Range Rover"

#use split function
cars = cars.split(',')

print(cars)

Output

['Porsche', ' G Wagon', ' Mercedes', ' Audi', ' Range Rover']

Convert Comma-Delimited String to a List Using List Comprehension

A list comprehension in Python is nothing but a shorthand used to create lists with a very few lines of code. Here is how you can make use of list comprehensions to convert a comma separated string to a list in Python:

Python3

#string
cars = "Porsche, G Wagon, Mercedes, Audi, Range Rover"

#list comprehension
cars = [i.strip() for i in cars.split(',')]

print(cars)

Output

['Porsche', 'G Wagon', 'Mercedes', 'Audi', 'Range Rover']

Convert Comma-Delimited String to a List Using re Module

The re or regular expression module of Python contains the re.split() method that splits a string based on a pattern. In the code, you can see that the regular expression used for splitting the string is ‘r‘\s*, \s*’’. Here, the ‘\s*’ is looking for zero or more whitespace characters while the ‘,’ looks for a comma(,) in the given string. Further, the ‘\s*’ in the end also looks for zero or more whitespace characters.

Python3

#import the re module
import re

#string
cars = "Porsche, G Wagon, Mercedes, Audi, Range Rover"

#regex/regular expression
cars = re.split(r'\s*,\s*', cars)

print(cars)

Output

['Porsche', 'G Wagon', 'Mercedes', 'Audi', 'Range Rover']