[Python-ideas] str.split with empty separator (original) (raw)

Alexandre Conrad alexandre.conrad at gmail.com
Thu Jul 29 12:41:35 CEST 2010


Hello all,

What if str.split could take an empty separator?

'banana'.split('') ['b', 'a', 'n', 'a', 'n', 'a']

I know this can be done with:

list('banana') ['b', 'a', 'n', 'a', 'n', 'a']

I think that, semantically speaking, it would make sens to split where there are no characters (in between them). Right now you can join from an empty string:

''.join(['b', 'a', 'n', 'a', 'n', 'a'])

So why can't we split from an empty string?

This wouldn't introduce any backwards incompatible changes as str.split currently can't have an empty separator:

'banana'.split('') Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ValueError: empty separator

I would love to see my banana actually split. :)

Regards,

Alex twitter.com/alexconrad



More information about the Python-ideas mailing list