How can I create a new line after a set of characters in python

user_13780737 0
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I have the following code:

text = input('Enter your text: ')
if len(text) >= 16:
    text = text.replace(' ', '\n')
    print(f'Your new text is:\n{text}')

If a user inputs blah blah blah blah the user would get the following output:

Your new text is:
blah
blah
blah
blah

I'm just wondering how can I make my code add a new line after the last available space before the 16 characters mark. So the output should end up being:

Your new text is:
blah blah blah
blah

I'm fairly new to python and I feel like I'm missing some sort of method that can get this done.

python-3.x list python
5 Answers

The reason that your original problem is happening is because text = text.replace(' ', '\n') will replace all of the spaces with a newline character.

Also, the current answers will not work if the user inputs a string that is very long - the 2nd print() could result in a line that is longer than 16 characters. For example:

>>> text = "blah " * 20
>>> print(text[:15])
blah blah blah 
>>> print(text[15:])
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

For this to work on arbitrarily long user inputs, I'd suggest using a loop:

>>> text = "blah " * 20
>>> while len(text) > 16:
...     index = text[:16].rindex(' ') # finds the last space in the first 16 chars
...     print(text[:index].strip()) # strip() removes trailing spaces
...     text = text[index:] # Updates text to remove what we just printed
... 
blah blah blah
blah blah blah
blah blah blah
blah blah blah
blah blah blah
blah blah blah

>>> print(text.strip()) # Prints any remaining text after the loop
blah blah
user_6825250 
text = input('Enter your text: ')
list_ = text.split(' ')

if len(text) >= 16:
   for i, j in zip(range(len(list_)),list_):
      if i == len(list_)-1:
         break
      print(j, end=' ')
   print('\n'+ j)
user_148677300

I would use rindex to search for the last occurrence of a space and then memorise the index position. As strings in Python are immutable I'd just form a new one with a \n in the middle, like this:

text = input('Enter your text: ')
if len(text) >= 16:
     last_space_before_16 = text[:16].rindex(' ')
     text = text[:last_space_before_16] + '\n' + text[last_space_before_16+1:]
     print(f'Your new text is:\n{text}')
user_12785180

I can suggest a regex based approach here:

inp = "blah blah blah blah"
output = re.sub(r'^(.{1,16})\s+', r'\1\n', inp)
print(output)

This prints:

blah blah blah
blah

The strategy here is to greedily match up to 16 characters, which are followed by breaking whitespace characters. Then, we replace by adding a newline character.

user_18632290

You can limit it to the first 16 characters by using this code:

text = text[:15]
print(text)
user_169426260
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