6.9. Splitting and Joining Strings¶
Two of the most useful methods on strings involve lists of strings. The split
method breaks a string into a list
of words. By default, any number of whitespace characters is considered a word boundary.
![shows the phrase "leaders and best" being split on spaces](../_images/split_default.gif)
An optional argument called a delimiter can be used to specify which characters to use as word boundaries.
![shows example of splitting "leaders and best" on "e"](../_images/split_on_e.jpeg)
The following example uses the string ai
as the delimiter:
Notice that the delimiter doesn’t appear in the result.
The inverse of the split
method is join
. You choose a
desired separator string, (often called the glue)
and join the list with the glue between each of the elements.
![shows process of a "/" separating the words "leaders", "and", "best"](../_images/join.gif)
The list that you glue together (wds
in this example) is not modified. Also,
you can use empty glue or multi-character strings as glue.
Check your understanding
Create a new list of the 6th through 13th elements of lst
(eight items in all) and assign it to the variable output
.
Create a variable output
and assign to it a list whose elements are the words in the string str1
.