I have arrived here while attempting to break down a larger problem. I got to this question when attempting to split a line on any whitespace character so that I could then add several other characters like ';' and ':'. Ultimately splitting a line on any char in a union of string.whitespace and some pre-designated chars.
I am now beginning to think that I have outgrown split() and must move up to regular expressions. If that is the case, I will go off and RTFM on RegEx. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
