split with "*" in string and ljust() puzzles

[George Sakkis]

Serge Orlov wrote:

> Sambo wrote:
> > I have just (finally) realized that it is splitting and removing
> > on single space but that seams useless, and split items
> > 1 and 2 are empty strings not spaces??
>
> What is useless for you is worth $1,000,000 for somebody else ;)
> If you have comma separated list '1,,2'.split(',') naturally returns
> ['1', '', '2']. I think you can get what you want with a simple regexp.

No need for regexp in this case, just use None to specify one or more
whitespace chars as delimiter: line.split(None,3)

George