How to parse a string completely into a list

[john.ford at colorado.edu]

On Sep 24, 10:12 pm, Matt Nordhoff <mnordh... at mattnordhoff.com> wrote:
> john.f... at colorado.edu wrote:
> > On Sep 24, 9:44 pm, "Chris Rebert" <c... at rebertia.com> wrote:
> >> On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 8:30 PM,  <john.f... at colorado.edu> wrote:
> >>> I want to take a long alpha-numeric string with \n and white-space and
> >>> place ALL elements of the string (even individual parts of a long
> >>> white-space) into separate list elements. The most common way I've
> >>> seen this performed is with the split() function, however I don't
> >>> believe that it has the power to do what I am looking for.
> >>> Any suggestions?
> >>> thanks
> >> Could you please define exactly what you mean by "elements" of a string?
>
> >> If you mean characters, then just use list():>>> list("  \n \t abc")
>
> >> [' ', ' ', '\n', ' ', '\t', ' ', 'a', 'b', 'c']
>
> >> Regards,
> >> Chris
>
> > Worked like a charm.
> > kudos!
>
> Why do you need to convert it to a list? Strings are sequences, so you
> can do things like slice them or iterate through them by character:
>
> >>> for character in "foo":
>
> ...     print character
> ...
> f
> o
> o
>
> --

The string draws a map that I then want to be able to traverse
through. If I can count through the individual characters of a list I
can create an x-y coordinate plane for navigation.