PYTHON PROGRAMMING: REPLICATING THE SPLIT FUNCTION

The Split function is a string manipulation function that can break down a string into smaller parts. The Split function does this based on the delimiter given and returns a list of all the substrings resulting from the breakdown.

The split function is defined this way:

split(delimiter, maxsplit)

Where maxsplit tells the function the maximum number of splits to make from the string, based on the delimiter.

# usage of the split function
a = "I love you"
# When it is used with no delimiter, the interpreter assumes the delimiter is a space " " :
print(a.split())
>>>['I', 'love', 'you']

The code box above shows how the split function works. For more on that, W3schools has a section dedicated to the split function.

Now, let us get into the meat of the topic. We will replicate the split function considering the following:

1. The program has to read the string, character by character, and compare each character to the delimiter.
2. If a character and the delimiter are the same, we break the string at that point.
3. The split function returns a list of the split string. This means we have to concatenate(characters) and append(substrings) as the program progresses.
4. A function split is declared with two parameters, word, and delimiter: the word is the string we want to split.
5. An empty list word_list is created alongside an empty string, stringcat
6. The for loop implements 1. The if/else statement implements 2 and part of 3.
7. And the return statement returns the list word_list which contains the substring.
8. The print statement at the end prints out the list.

"""
I want to replicate the split function 
This function will use one delimeter

"""
# first point of call is to read through the string
def split(word = "", delimeter = ""):
    word_list = []
    stringcat = ""
    for i in word:
        if i == delimeter:
            # when we find the delimeter, we pass the already read characters to a list
            word_list.append(stringcat)
            #we need to delete the items in strinngcat to create another string
            stringcat = ""
        # concatenate as we read
        else:
            stringcat = stringcat + i
    word_list.append(stringcat)
    return(word_list)

#function call in print statement

print(split("I,love,you,like,no,other ", " "))
>>>['I', 'love', 'you', 'like', 'no', 'other']

I have gone about this based on my thought process. It will be great to learn from your insights. Feel free to comment!

Thank you for reading!