Question

The default split method in Python treats consecutive spaces as a single delimiter. But if you specify a delimiter string, consecutive delimiters are not collapsed:

>>> 'aaa'.split('a')
['', '', '', '']

What is the most straightforward way to collapse consecutive delimiters? I know I could just remove empty strings from the result list:

>>> result = 'aaa'.split('a')
>>> result
['', '', '', '']
>>> result = [item for item in result if item]

But is there a more convenient way?

Answer 1

You can use re.split with a regular expression as the delimiter, as in:

re.split(pattern, string[, maxsplit=0, flags=0])