How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: The PreTeXt Interactive Edition

Python has a built-in type conversion function called list that tries to turn whatever you give it into a list. For example, try the following:

The string “Crunchy Frog” is turned into a list by taking each character in the string and placing it in a list. In general, any sequence can be turned into a list using this function. The result will be a list containing the elements in the original sequence. It is not legal to use the list conversion function on any argument that is not a sequence.

It is also important to point out that the list conversion function will place each element of the original sequence in the new list. When working with strings, this is very different than the result of the split method. Whereas split will break a string into a list of “words”, list will always break it into a list of characters.