how to avoid leading white spaces

[Ethan Furman]

Chris Torek wrote:
>> On 2011-06-03, rurpy at yahoo.com <rurpy at yahoo.com> wrote:
> [prefers]
>>>     re.split ('[ ,]', source)
> 
> This is probably not what you want in dealing with
> human-created text:
> 
>     >>> re.split('[ ,]', 'foo bar, spam,maps')
>     ['foo', '', 'bar', '', 'spam', 'maps']

I think you've got a typo in there... this is what I get:

--> re.split('[ ,]', 'foo bar, spam,maps')
['foo', 'bar', '', 'spam', 'maps']

I would add a * to get rid of that empty element, myself:
--> re.split('[ ,]*', 'foo bar, spam,maps')
['foo', 'bar', 'spam', 'maps']

~Ethan~