12. split and join

Two of the most useful methods involving lists and strings are the complimentary methods split and join. The split method is used on a string and breaks the string into a list of words. By default, any number of whitespace characters is considered a word boundary.

An optional argument called a delimiter can be used to specify which characters to use as word boundaries. The following example uses the string ai as the delimiter:

Notice that the delimiter doesn’t appear in the result.

The inverse of the split method is join, which is used on a list. You choose a desired separator string, (often called the glue) and join the list with the glue between each of the elements to form a new string.

The list whose elements you glued together (words in this example) is not itself modified. Also, you can use empty glue or multi-character strings as glue.

List Type Conversion Function

Python has a built-in type conversion function called list that tries to turn whatever you give it into a list. For example, try the following:

The string "Crunchy Frog" is turned into a list by taking each character in the string and placing it in a list. In general, any sequence can be turned into a list using this function. The result will be a list containing the elements in the original sequence. It is not legal to use the list conversion function on any argument that is not a sequence.

It is also important to point out that the list conversion function will place each element of the original sequence in the new list. When working with strings, this is very different than the result of the split method. Whereas split will break a string into a list of words, list will always break it into a list of characters.

Check your understanding

    What is printed by the following statements?

    my_name = "Edgar Allan Poe"
name_list = my_name.split()
init = ""
for name in name_list:
    init = init + name[0]
print(init)
  • Poe
  • Three characters but not the right ones. name_list is the list of names.
  • EdgarAllanPoe
  • Too many characters in this case. There should be a single letter from each name.
  • EAP
  • Yes, split creates a list of the three names. The for loop iterates through the names and creates a string from the first characters.
  • William Shakespeare
  • That does not make any sense.