Attached patch tries to optimize str.split by a speciaiized splitter for one character separacters. This trick is used for unicode.split too. I just applied it to str.split. :) quick perf. test: - BEFORE - % ./python Lib/timeit.py '"/aaa/bbb/ccc/ddd/eee/fff/ggg/hhh/iii".split("/")' 100000 loops, best of 3: 7.84 usec per loop - AFTER - % ./python Lib/timeit.py '"/aaa/bbb/ccc/ddd/eee/fff/ggg/hhh/iii".split("/")' 100000 loops, best of 3: 5.39 usec per loop