newby question: Splitting a string - separator

[bonono at gmail.com]

Thomas Liesner wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> i am having a textfile which contains a single string with names.
> I want to split this string into its records an put them into a list.
> In "normal" cases i would do something like:
>
> > #!/usr/bin/python
> > inp = open("file")
> > data = inp.read()
> > names = data.split()
> > inp.close()
>
> The problem is, that the names contain spaces an the records are also
> just seprarated by spaces. The only thing i can rely on, ist that the
> recordseparator is always more than a single whitespace.
>
> I thought of something like defining the separator for split() by using
>  a regex for "more than one whitespace". RegEx for whitespace is \s, but
> what would i use for "more than one"? \s+?
>
Can I just use "two space" as the seperator ?

[ x.strip() for x in data.split("  ") ]