String Formatting in Python2.7 with result from Net commands

Question

I created a batch file that writes user names to a file. It works perfectly and cleans up net user and writes the user names to a file so it would look like this:

Administrator Michael Guest
Pianoman Billy George

I don't know how many usernames there will be so my question is: how can I clean up this white space between the undetermined number of names since I don't know the length of names I'll be dealing with and thus not know how many spaces there will be.

My python program is supposed to read these names from a file and turn them into a list. I was planning on just using .split(" ") so ideally someone could suggest a way to get the difference down to one space between each name. I already looked at .format method, and it doesn't seem to be up to the task. I'm also open if there is a somewhat readable way (doubtable) to format this in batch.

BTW: I considered simply redirecting the output from dir /B C:\Users but this doesn't work in situation.

Answer 1

Use .split() without sep argument:

string.split(s[, sep[, maxsplit]])

Return a list of the words of the string s. If the optional second argument sep is absent or None, the words are separated by arbitrary strings of whitespace characters (space, tab, newline, return, formfeed). If the second argument sep is present and not None, it specifies a string to be used as the word separator. The returned list will then have one more item than the number of non-overlapping occurrences of the separator in the string. If maxsplit is given, at most maxsplit number of splits occur, and the remainder of the string is returned as the final element of the list (thus, the list will have at most maxsplit+1 elements). If maxsplit is not specified or -1, then there is no limit on the number of splits (all possible splits are made).

The behavior of split on an empty string depends on the value of sep. If sep is not specified, or specified as None, the result will be an empty list. If sep is specified as any string, the result will be a list containing one element which is an empty string.

Example:

>>> x='Administrator            CLIENT1                  Guest'
>>> x.split(' ')
['Administrator', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', 'CLIENT1', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '','Guest']
>>> x.split()
['Administrator', 'CLIENT1', 'Guest']
>>>

Another approach:

>>> import string
>>> x='Administrator            CLIENT1                  Guest'
>>> string.split(x,' ')
['Administrator', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', 'CLIENT1', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '','Guest']
>>> string.split(x)
['Administrator', 'CLIENT1', 'Guest']
>>>