I'm trying to convert a string to a list of words using python. I want to take something like the following:
string = 'This is a string, with words!'
Then convert to something like this :
list = ['This', 'is', 'a', 'string', 'with', 'words']
Notice the omission of punctuation and spaces. What would be the fastest way of going about this?
To do this properly is quite complex. For your research, it is known as word tokenization. You should look at NLTK if you want to see what others have done, rather than starting from scratch:
>>> import nltk
>>> paragraph = u"Hi, this is my first sentence. And this is my second."
>>> sentences = nltk.sent_tokenize(paragraph)
>>> for sentence in sentences:
... nltk.word_tokenize(sentence)
[u'Hi', u',', u'this', u'is', u'my', u'first', u'sentence', u'.']
[u'And', u'this', u'is', u'my', u'second', u'.']