reverse string by word with python

Reverse string by word is a very popular interview question. In python you can solve it easily with code like below.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
def (s):
lst = s.split()
return ' '.join(lst[::-1])
s = 'Power of Love'
print reverse_string_by_word(s)
# Love of Power
s = 'Hello World!'
print reverse_string_by_word(s)
# World! Hello

We can see above implementation is good but not enough, in 2nd string we are expecting the ! symbol should be reversed as well, and keep original blank spaces between words. (multiple spaces between Hello and World in the example)

1
2
print reverse_string_by_word(s)
# Expected: !World Hello

To improve the solution, a better choice should be re module. You might want to take a look at re.split() method.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
import re
s = 'Hello World!'
re.split(r's+', s) # will discard blank spaces
['Hello', 'World!']
re.split(r'(s+)', s) # will keep spaces as a group
['Hello', ' ', 'World!']
s = '< Welcome to EF.COM! >'
>>> re.split(r's+', s) # split by spaces
['<', 'Welcome', 'to', 'EF.COM!', '>']
>>> re.split(r'(w+)', s) # exactly split by word
['< ', 'Welcome', ' ', 'to', ' ', 'EF', '.', 'COM', '! >']
>>> re.split(r'(s+|w+)', s) # split by space and word
['<', ' ', '', 'Welcome', '', ' ', '', 'to', '', ' ', '', 'EF', '.', 'COM', '!', ' ', '>']
>>> ''.join(re.split(r'(s+|w+)', s)[::-1])
'> !COM.EF to Welcome <'
>>> ''.join(re.split(r'(s+)', s)[::-1])
'> EF.COM! to Welcome <'
>>> ''.join(re.split(r'(w+)', s)[::-1])
'! >COM.EF to Welcome< '

If you would like to increase the readability a little bit, replacing list slicing to reversed() is a choice.

1
2
>>> ''.join(reversed(re.split(r'(s+|w+)', s)))
'> !COM.EF to Welcome <'

Bingo, so easy!