On Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 7:06 AM Irv Kalb <i...@furrypants.com> wrote:
> If I join the list with the empty string as the delimiter:
>
> >>> myList = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']
> >>> myString = ''.join(myList)
> >>> print(myString)
> abcd
>
> That works great. But attempting to split using the empty string generates
> an error:
>
> >>> myString.split('')
> Traceback (most recent call last):
> File "<pyshell#9>", line 1, in <module>
> myString.split('')
> ValueError: empty separator
>
> But my question is: Is there any good reason why the split function should
> give an "empty separator" error? I think the meaning of trying to split a
> string into a list using the empty string as a delimiter is unambiguous - it
> should just create a list of single characters strings like the list function
> does here.
>
Agreed. There are a number of other languages where splitting on an
empty delimiter simply fractures the string into characters (I checked
Pike, JavaScript, Tcl, and Ruby), and it's a practical and useful
feature. +1.
ChrisA
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