Question

I’m trying to write a function that does something like this:

>>> Give-me the name of three famous American (use a comma to separate the names).
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Carl Sagan

And put the given names into a list like this: [“Benjamin Franklin”, “Thomas Jefferson”, “Carl Sagan”] and NOT a list like this: [‘Benjamin’, ‘Franklin,’, ‘Thomas’, ‘Jefferson,’, ‘Carl’, ‘Sagan’] as the split() method does.

There are (in Python 2.6) some method or function that can recognize the comma to form lists elements?

Answer 1

The split method of the string also takes a separator as an optional argument.

>>> names = 'Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Carl Sagan'
>>> names.split(',')
['Benjamin Franklin', ' Thomas Jefferson', ' Carl Sagan']