Question

I want to break a Python string into its characters.

sequenceOfAlphabets = list( string.uppercase )

works.

However, why does not

sequenceOfAlphabets = re.split( '.', string.uppercase )

work?

All I get are empty, albeit expected count of elements

Answer 1

The '.' matches every character and re.split returns everything that wasn’t matched, that’s why you’re getting the empty list.

Using list is usually the way to handle something like this but if you want to use regular expressions just use re.findall

sequenceOfAlphabets = re.findall( '.', string.uppercase )

That should give you ['A', 'B', 'C', .... ,'Z']