How to remove from a list the strings that have less than N tokens?

Question

Given a list of strings, say:

a = ['hey','hey how are you','good how are you','I am', 'I am fine 8998','9809 908']

How can I remove the strings that have less than three tokens?:

a = ['hey how are you','good how are you', 'I am fine 8998']

I tried to:

' '.join(a.split(' ')[3:])

However, its not working. Any idea of how to remove all the strings that have less than three tokens

Answer 1

You could use this list comprehension:

>>> [i for i in a if len(i.split())>=3]
['hey how are you', 'good how are you', 'I am fine 8998']

Answer 2

This is another way of doing the same using filter and lambda :

a = ['hey','hey how are you','good how are you','I am', 'I am fine 8998','9809 908']

res = list(filter(lambda x: x.count(' ') >= 2, a))
# ['hey how are you', 'good how are you', 'I am fine 8998']

Or:

res = list(filter(lambda x: len(x.split()) >= 3, a))