Help with splitting

[RickMuller]

I'm trying to split a string into pieces on whitespace, but I want to
save the whitespace characters rather than discarding them.

For example, I want to split the string '1    2' into ['1','    ','2'].
I was certain that there was a way to do this using the standard string
functions, but I just spent some time poring over the documentation
without finding anything.

There's a chance I was instead thinking of something in the re module,
but I also spent some time there without luck. Could someone point me
to the right function, if it exists?

Thanks in advance.

R.