Get the last names that start with a specific letter-CodePudding

authors = ['Audre Lorde', 'William Carlos', 'Gabriela Mistral', 'Jean Toomer', 'An Qi', 'Walt Whitman', 'Shel Silverstein', 'Carmen Boullosa', 'Kamala Suraiyya', 'Langston Hughes', 'Adrienne Rich', 'Nikki Giovanni']

In this list, I want to get the names that have last names start with (let's say 'S') in Python. How do I do that? To be honest, I have no clue where to start as I am still a beginner, I tried join and split but they brought only the last name itself.

CodePudding user response：

For your learning.

The list in question is not well formed.

Let's assume it is well formed. Below is simple example.

authors = ['Audre Lorde', 'William Carlos', 'Gabriela Mistral', 'Jean Toomer']

newlist = [x for x in authors if x.split(" ")[1].startswith('C')]

CodePudding user response：

Matching names can be difficult because you can have multiple first and last names, see this page for a nice read Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names.

If you can have a single name as well, you can take the last entry after splitting:

authors = ['Audre Lorde', 'William Carlos', 'Gabriela Mistral', 'Jean Toomer', 'Cher']

print([a for a in authors if a.split(" ")[-1].startswith('C')])

If you want to for example check the number of splitted parts and do not want to allow single names:

for a in authors:
    parts = a.split(" ")
    if len(parts) > 1 and parts[1].startswith('C'):
        print(parts[1])