python - How to split strings inside a list by whitespace characters

Question

So stdin returns a string of text into a list, and multiple lines of text are all list elements. How do you split them all into single words?

mylist = ['this is a string of text 
', 'this is a different string of text 
', 'and for good measure here is another one 
']

wanted output:

newlist = ['this', 'is', 'a', 'string', 'of', 'text', 'this', 'is', 'a', 'different', 'string', 'of', 'text', 'and', 'for', 'good', 'measure', 'here', 'is', 'another', 'one']

Answer 1

You can use simple list comprehension, like:

newlist = [word for line in mylist for word in line.split()]

This generates:

>>> [word for line in mylist for word in line.split()]
['this', 'is', 'a', 'string', 'of', 'text', 'this', 'is', 'a', 'different', 'string', 'of', 'text', 'and', 'for', 'good', 'measure', 'here', 'is', 'another', 'one']