How can I get the first and last item of every item of list

Question

I have a list of names of persons and I want to extract the title and the last name. I have written the following code:

people = ['Dr. Christopher Brooks', 'Dr. Kevyn Collins-Thompson', 'Dr. VG Vinod Vydiswaran', 'Dr. Daniel Romero']

def split_title_and_name(person):
    for i in person:
        title = [i.split(' ')[0] for i in person]
        lname = [i.split(' ')[-1] for i in person]
    return (title + lname)

The output I'm getting is :

['Dr.',
 'Dr.',
 'Dr.',
 'Dr.',
 'Brooks',
 'Collins-Thompson',
 'Vydiswaran',
 'Romero']

The result which I want is like this:

['Dr.Brooks' , 'Dr.Collins-Thompson' ...]

Answer 1

title contains a list of all first names lname contains a los of all the last names Seems like you need a zip operation

print("Zip:")
for x, y in zip(a, b):
    print(x, y)

Answer 2

Instead of two separate lists, just do it all at once:

names = [i.split(' ')[0] + i.split(' ')[-1] for i in people] 

The way you're doing it, you're trying to add two lists together - what you want is to add the two strings together as you're making the list. You can do this all in one line, as above - the outer for loop isn't even necessary.

Answer 3

Seems like you just need to split in a comprehension and then pull out the first and last in another one:

people = ['Dr. Christopher Brooks', 'Dr. Kevyn Collins-Thompson', 'Dr. VG Vinod Vydiswaran', 'Dr. Daniel Romero']

[n[0]+n[-1] for n in [p.split(' ') for p in people]]

>>> ['Dr.Brooks', 'Dr.Collins-Thompson', 'Dr.Vydiswaran', 'Dr.Romero']

You could also split with a regex, although this is probably overkill for this:

import re
regex = re.compile("\s.+\s")
[''.join(regex.split(s)) for s in people]

>>> ['Dr.Brooks', 'Dr.Collins-Thompson', 'Dr.Vydiswaran', 'Dr.Romero']