Question

There is one thing that I do not understand…

Imagine you have a text = ‘hello world’ and you want to split it.

In some places I see people that want to split the text doing:

string.split(text) 

In other places I see people just doing:

text.split() 

What’s the difference? Why you do in one way or in the other way? Can you give me a theory explanation about that?

Answer 1

Interestingly, the docstrings for the two are not completely the same in Python 2.5.1:

>>> import string >>> help(string.split) Help on function split in module string:  split(s, sep=None, maxsplit=-1)     split(s [,sep [,maxsplit]]) -> list of strings      Return a list of the words in the string s, using sep as the     delimiter string.  If maxsplit is given, splits at no more than     maxsplit places (resulting in at most maxsplit+1 words).  If sep     is not specified or is None, any whitespace string is a separator.      (split and splitfields are synonymous)  >>> help(''.split) Help on built-in function split:  split(...)     S.split([sep [,maxsplit]]) -> list of strings      Return a list of the words in the string S, using sep as the     delimiter string.  If maxsplit is given, at most maxsplit     splits are done. If sep is not specified or is None, any     whitespace string is a separator. 

Digging deeper, you’ll see that the two forms are completely equivalent, as string.split(s) actually calls s.split() (search for the split-functions).