Python 3 Text Processing with NLTK 3 Cookbook

Tokenizing sentences into words

In this recipe, we'll split a sentence into individual words. The simple task of creating a list of words from a string is an essential part of all text processing.

How to do it...

Basic word tokenization is very simple; use the word_toke nize() function:

>>> from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize
>>> word_tokenize('Hello World.')
['Hello', 'World', '.']

How it works...

The word_tokenize() function is a wrapper function that calls tokenize() on an instance of the TreebankWordTokenizer class. It's equivalent to the following code:

>>> from nltk.tokenize import TreebankWordTokenizer
>>> tokenizer = TreebankWordTokenizer()
>>> tokenizer.tokenize('Hello World.')
['Hello', 'World', '.']

It works by separating words using spaces ...