How to strip a string after a certain amount of words in python

Question

I have a paragraph "Lorem ipsum foo bar foobar stuff etc"
In python, how might I strip this string after a certain amount of words say in this case 4?

Answer 1

I have two solutions.

The first uses more memory:

s = "Lorem ipsum foo bar foobar stuff etc"
print ' '.join(s.split(" ")[:4])

The second may be slower:

s = "Lorem ipsum foo bar foobar stuff etc"
start = 0
for i in range(4): # number of words
    start = s.find(" ", start+1)
print s[:start]