[Python-Dev] Bug 911080, string split oddness (original) (raw)

Pete Shinners pete at shinners.org
Sat Mar 6 15:52:13 EST 2004

I just filed Bug #911080. Sorry if this has been discussed before, at minimum I believe there should be a documentation fix.

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=911080&group_id=5470&atid=105470

Basically this documents the difference between "a b c".split() "a b c".split(" ")

This is a quirky little change in behavior that I've seen confuse newbies. Unfortunately there are needs for both styles of splitting.

In a world where backward breaking changes aren't a big deal, I would think split() would always work like the first version, and splitfields() would change to work like the second version. But that would break just about everything, so I suppose split either needs another optional argument or a different split method. (splitgroup? splitseq?)

The only workaround is to use regular expression splitting. But that's not a direction I like to point newbies towards too quickly.

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