How to split a float number string into two lists?

Question

I have the string '1234.12' and I want to split it into two lists: [1234] and [12] .

The only way I know is to make the whole string into a list by using .split() with a comprehension: [n.split() for n in '1234.12'] , which gives me:

[['1'], ['2'], ['3'], ['4'], ['.'], ['1'], ['2']]

Answer 1

s = '1234.12'

a,b = ([int(x)]  for x in s.split(".",1))

print(a,b)

Or just do it in 2 parts, map to int and just wrap in lists after:

s = '1234.12'

a, b = map(int,s.split(".", 1))

a,b = [a],[b]

Which will both give you the two numbers cast to int and wrapped in lists:

a -> [1234]
b ->  [12]

Answer 2

You can split the string with dot and the n use map function to convert the result to list:

>>> map(list,s.split('.'))
[['1', '2', '3', '4'], ['1', '2']]

And of you want the result as int you can use int function within map :

>>> map(int,s.split('.'))
[1234, 12]

Note that in this case you can access to the numbers with a simple indexing and don't need to put each of them within a list.

Answer 3

To explain why what you were trying wasn't working,

n.split() for n in '1234.12'

is effectively equivalent to

for n in '1234.12':
    n.split()

When you iterate over a string like that, you end up getting the individual characters, so we can also say that is equivalent to:

for n in ('1', '2', '3', '4', '.', '1', '2'):
    n.split()

So since the split was only given a single character at a time, it wasn't functional. You want to move the split to the string itself:

n for n in '1234.12'.split()

At which point you don't need the comprehension anymore.

'1234.12'.split()

The last piece was explained elsewhere... split , by default, splits on whitespace, so to tell it to split on a period instead:

'1234.12'.split('.')