Switch Lastname, Firstname to Firstname Lastname inside List

Question

I have two lists of sports players. One is structured simply:

['Lastname, Firstname', 'Lastname2, Firstname2'..]

The second is a list of lists structured:

[['Firstname Lastname', 'Team', 'Position', 'Ranking']...]

I ultimately want to search the contents of the second list and pull the info if there is a matching name from the first list.

I need to swap 'Lastname, Firstname' to 'Firstname Lastname' to match list 2's formatting for simplification.

Any help would be great. Thanks!

Answer 1

You can swap the order in the list of names with:

[" ".join(n.split(", ")[::-1]) for n in namelist]

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An explanation: this is a list comprehension that does something to each item. Here are a few intermediate versions and what they would return:

namelist = ["Robinson, David", "Roberts, Tim"]
# split each item into a list, around the commas:
[n.split(", ") for n in namelist]
# [['Robinson', 'David'], ['Roberts', 'Tim']]

# reverse the split up list:
[n.split(", ")[::-1] for n in namelist]
# [['David', 'Robinson'], ['Tim', 'Roberts']]

# join it back together with a space:
[" ".join(n.split(", ")[::-1]) for n in namelist]
# ['David Robinson', 'Tim Roberts']