Split string based on a regular expression

Question

I have the output of a command in tabular form. I\'m parsing this output from a result file and storing it in a string. Each element in one row is separated by one or more w

Answer 1

The str.split method will automatically remove all white space between items:

>>> str1 = "a    b     c      d"
>>> str1.split()
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']

Docs are here: http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#str.split