Erasing everything from every element in a list except the first few numbers in those elements

Question

I have a list in Python that looks like this:

['29382 this is something', '2938535 hello there', '392835 dont care for this', '22024811 yup']

I need to process it so that it like this:

['29382', '2938535', '392835', '22024811']

How would I go on about doing this? I guess I could use re, but I don't know how to apply it in this situation.

Answer 1

You do not need regex for this, you can use split within a list comprehension.

>>> l = ['29382 this is something', '2938535 hello there', '392835 dont care for this', '22024811 yup']

>>> [i.split(' ', 1)[0] for i in l]
['29382', '2938535', '392835', '22024811']

Answer 2

Something like

>>> l=['29382 this is something', '2938535 hello there', '392835 dont care for this', '22024811 yup']
>>> import re
>>> [ re.sub(r'\D', '', x) for x in l]
['29382', '2938535', '392835', '22024811']