Will McGugan wrote:
Hi,
I'm curious about the behaviour of the str.split() when applied to empty
strings.
"".split() returns an empty list, however..
"".split("*") returns a list containing one empty string.
Both of these make sense as limiting cases.
Consider
>>> "a b c".split()
['a', 'b', 'c']
>>> "a b".split()
['a', 'b']
>>> "a".split()
['a']
>>> "".split()
[]
and
>>> "**".split("*")
['', '', '']
>>> "*".split("*")
['', '']
>>> "".split("*")
['']
The split() method is really doing two somewhat different things
depending on whether it is given an argument, and the end-cases
come out differently.
--
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg
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