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pythonsortingline

Find Nth item in comma separated list in Python

I have a large CSV with comma separated lines of varying length. Sorting another set of data I used split(',') in a loop to separate fields, but this method requires each line to have the same number of entries. Is there a way I can look at a line and, independent of the total number of entries, just pull the Nth item? For reference, the method I was using will only work with a line that looks like AAA,BBB,CCC,DDD

entry = 'A,B,C,D'

(a,b,c,d) = entry.split(',')
print a,b,c,d

But I would like to pull A and C even if it looks like A,B,C,D,E,F or A,B,C.

Solution

  • Use a list instead of separate variables.

    values = entry.split(',')
print values[0], values[2]