Question

Possible Duplicate:
Split string on whitespace in python

I have a string like so:

['.text      0x1000       0xb51b       0xb600       6.259216    ']

and I would like to split it into this:

[.text, 0x1000, 0xb51b... etc]

So far I’ve tried:
re.split(“( )“, b)
and
re.split(“[ \t]”, b)

but to no avail. I get things like:

.['.text', ' ', '0x1000', ' ', '0xb51b', ' ', '0xb600', ' ', '6.259216', ' ', '']

or some others with even more whitespaces. I know I could just remove the whitespaces from the string but I would much rather just straight up use a RE to split them in the first place.

Answer 1

Why not just use the regular str.split?

'.text      0x1000       0xb51b       0xb600       6.259216    '.split()

To quote the documentation:

if sep is not specified or is None, a different splitting algorithm is applied: runs of consecutive whitespace are regarded as a single separator, and the result will contain no empty strings at the start or end if the string has leading or trailing whitespace.

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As an aside, I’ve found that using mystring.split(None) (as opposed to mystring.split()) is sometimes quite a useful thing to keep in mind as it allows you to not “hardcode” the splitting algorithm.