Python | Words lengths in String

We sometimes come through the situations where we require to get all the words lengths present in the string, this can be a tedious task done using naive method. Hence having shorthands to perform this task is always useful. Let’s discuss certain ways to achieve this.

Method #1 : Using split() + len()
Using split function, we can split the string into a list of words and is most generic and recommended method if one wished to accomplish this particular task. But drawback is that it fails in the cases in string contains punctuation marks. The len() is used to compute string length.

# Python3 code to demonstrate
# Words lengths in String
# using split()

# initializing string
test_string = "Geeksforgeeks is best Computer Science Portal"

# printing original string
print ("The original string is : " + test_string)

# using split()
# Words lengths in String
res = list(map(len, test_string.split()))

# printing result
print ("The list of words lengths is : " + str(res))

Output :

The original string is : Geeksforgeeks is best Computer Science Portal
The list of words lengths is : [13, 2, 4, 8, 7, 6]

Method #2 : Using regex( findall() ) + len()
In the cases which contain all the special characters and punctuation marks, as discussed above, the conventional method of finding words in 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. The len() is used to compute string length.

# Python3 code to demonstrate
# Words lengths in String
# using regex( findall() )
import re

# initializing string
test_string = "Geeksforgeeks, is best @# Computer Science Portal.!!!"

# printing original string
print ("The original string is : " + test_string)

# using regex( findall() )
# Words lengths in String
res = list(map(len, re.findall(r'\w+', test_string)))

# printing result
print ("The list of words lengths is : " + str(res))

Output :

The original string is : Geeksforgeeks is best Computer Science Portal
The list of words lengths is : [13, 2, 4, 8, 7, 6]