How to Split a String in Python

When working with strings, one of the everyday operations is to split a string into an array of substrings using a given delimiter.

In this article, we will talk about how to split string in Python.

.split() Method #

In Python, strings are represented as immutable str objects. The str class comes with a number of string methods that allow you to manipulate the string.

The .split() method returns a list of substrings separated by a delimiter. It takes the following syntax:

str.split(delim=None, maxsplit=-1)

The delimiter can be a character or sequence of characters, not a regular expression.

In the example, below we’re splitting the string s using the comma (,) as a delimiter:

s = 'Sansa,Tyrion,Jon's.split(',')

The result is a list of strings:

['Sansa', 'Tyrion', 'Jon']

A sequence of characters can also be used as a delimiter:

s = 'Sansa::Tyrion::Jon's.split('::')

['Sansa', 'Tyrion', 'Jon']

When maxsplit is given, it will limit the number of splits. If not specified or -1, there is no limit on the number of splits.

s = 'Sansa;Tyrion;Jon's.split(';', 1)

The result list will have maximum maxsplit+1 elements:

['Sansa', 'Tyrion;Jon']

If the delim is not specified or it is Null, the string will be split using whitespace as a delimiter. All consecutive whitespace are considered as a single separator. Also, if the string contains trailing and leading whitespaces the result, will have no empty strings.

To better illustrate this, let’s take a look at the following example:

' Daenerys  Hodor Arya   Jaime Bran '.split()

['Daenerys', 'Hodor', 'Arya', 'Jaime', 'Bran']

' Daenerys  Hodor Arya   Jaime Bran '.split(' ')

['', 'Daenerys', '', 'Hodor', 'Arya', '', '', 'Jaime', 'Bran', '']

When no delimiter is used, the returning list contains no empty strings. If the delimiter is set to an empty space ' ' the leading, trailing, and consecutive whitespace will cause the result to contain empty strings.

Conclusion #

Splitting strings is one of the most basic operations. After reading this tutorial, you should have a good understanding of how to split strings in Python.

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment.