On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 6:32 PM, Patrick Maupin <pmau...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Oct 31, 5:52 pm, Ian Kelly <ian.g.ke...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> For instance, split() will split on vertical tab,
>> which is not one of the characters the OP wanted.
>
> That's just the default behavior. You can explicitly specify the
> separator to split on. But it's probably more efficient to just use
> translate with deletechars.
As I understood it, the point of using the default behavior was to
merge whitespace, which cannot be done when the separator is
explicitly specified. For example:
>>> " ".split()
[]
>>> " ".split(" ")
['', '', '', '', '', '']
It is easy to check that the first is empty. The second is a bit more
annoying and is O(n). Your point about deletechars is good, though,
definitely better than a regular expression.
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