[Python-ideas] Optional keepsep argument in str.split()

[Bruce Leban]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 10:49 PM, Jared Grubb <jared.grubb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Split and join are inverses, so it's lossless.
>

That's not true. If a separator is specified, it's lossless, but not in
this case:

>>> 'a b  c    d'.split()
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']
>>> ' '.join('a b  c    d'.split())
'a b c d'

I don't see a compelling use case for modifying split though. If I wanted
to keep separators around, I'd probably want to work with lists like these:

    ['a', ' ', 'b', '  ', 'c', '   ', 'd']
or
    [['a', ' '], ['b', '  '], ['c', '   '], ['d', '']]

and changing split to return either of those would be a bad idea.

--- Bruce
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