Iterate over words of a String in Python

Last Updated : 23 Jan, 2020

Given a String comprising of many words separated by space, write a Python program to iterate over these words of the string.

Examples:

Input: str = “GeeksforGeeks is a computer science portal for Geeks”
Output:
GeeksforGeeks
is
a
computer
science
portal
for
Geeks
Input: str = “Geeks for Geeks”
Output:
Geeks
for
Geeks

Method 1: Using split()

Using split() function, we can split the string into a list of words and is the most generic and recommended method if one wished to accomplish this particular task. But the drawback is that it fails in the cases in string contains punctuation marks.

# Python3 code to demonstrate  
# to extract words from string  
# using split() 
    
# initializing string   
test_string = "GeeksforGeeks is a computer science portal for Geeks"
    
# printing original string 
print ("The original string is : " +  test_string) 
    
# using split() 
# to extract words from string 
res = test_string.split() 
    
# printing result 
print ("\nThe words of string are")
for i in res:
    print(i)

Output:

The original string is : GeeksforGeeks is a computer science portal for Geeks

The words of string are
GeeksforGeeks
is
a
computer
science
portal
for
Geeks

Method 2: Using re.findall()

In the cases which contain all the special characters and punctuation marks, as discussed above, the conventional method of finding words in a string using split can fail and hence requires regular expressions to perform this task. findall() function returns the list after filtering the string and extracting words ignoring punctuation marks.

# Python3 code to demonstrate  
# to extract words from string  
# using regex( findall() ) 
import re 
    
# initializing string   
test_string = "GeeksforGeeks is a computer science portal for Geeks !!!"
    
# printing original string 
print ("The original string is : " +  test_string) 
    
# using regex( findall() ) 
# to extract words from string 
res = re.findall(r'\w+', test_string) 
    
# printing result 
print ("\nThe words of string are")
for i in res:
    print(i)

Output:

The original string is : GeeksforGeeks is a computer science portal for Geeks!!!

The words of string are
GeeksforGeeks
is
a
computer
science
portal
for
Geeks

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