Switch Lastname, Firstname to Firstname Lastname inside List

Question

I have two lists of sports players. One is structured simply: ``` ['Lastname, Firstname', 'Lastname2, Firstname2'..] ``` The second is a list of lists structured: ``` [['Firstname Lastname', 'Team', 'Position', 'Ranking']...] ``` I ultimately want to search the contents of the second list and pull the info if there is a matching name from the first list. I need to swap 'Lastname, Firstname' to 'Firstname Lastname' to match list 2's formatting for simplification. Any help would be great. Thanks!

Accepted Answer

You can swap the order in the list of names with:

```
[" ".join(n.split(", ")[::-1]) for n in namelist]
```

An explanation: this is a list comprehension that does something to each item. Here are a few intermediate versions and what they would return:

```
namelist = ["Robinson, David", "Roberts, Tim"]
# split each item into a list, around the commas:
[n.split(", ") for n in namelist]
# [['Robinson', 'David'], ['Roberts', 'Tim']]

# reverse the split up list:
[n.split(", ")[::-1] for n in namelist]
# [['David', 'Robinson'], ['Tim', 'Roberts']]

# join it back together with a space:
[" ".join(n.split(", ")[::-1]) for n in namelist]
# ['David Robinson', 'Tim Roberts']
```

Switch Lastname, Firstname to Firstname Lastname inside List

Solution

Problem