How to convert a string of space- and comma- separated numbers into a list of int? [duplicate]

Question

I have a string of numbers, something like:

example_string = '0, 0, 0, 11, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 19, 0, 9, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 11' 

I would like to convert this into a list:

example_list = [0, 0, 0, 11, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 19, 0, 9, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 11] 

I tried something like:

for i in example_string:     example_list.append(int(example_string[i])) 

But this obviously does not work, as the string contains spaces and commas. However, removing them is not an option, as numbers like '19' would be converted to 1 and 9. Could you please help me with this?

Answer 1

Split on commas, then map to integers:

map(int, example_string.split(',')) 

Or use a list comprehension:

[int(s) for s in example_string.split(',')] 

The latter works better if you want a list result, or you can wrap the map() call in list().

This works because int() tolerates whitespace:

>>> example_string = '0, 0, 0, 11, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 19, 0, 9, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 11' >>> list(map(int, example_string.split(',')))  # Python 3, in Python 2 the list() call is redundant [0, 0, 0, 11, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 19, 0, 9, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 11] >>> [int(s) for s in example_string.split(',')] [0, 0, 0, 11, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 19, 0, 9, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 11] 

Splitting on just a comma also is more tolerant of variable input; it doesn't matter if 0, 1 or 10 spaces are used between values.