How to convert a string with comma-delimited items to a list in Python?

Question

How do you convert a string into a list?

Say the string is like text = \"a,b,c\". After the conversion, text == [\'a\', \'b\', \'c\'] and h

Answer 1

split() is your friend here. I will cover a few aspects of split() that are not covered by other answers.

• If no arguments are passed to split(), it would split the string based on whitespace characters (space, tab, and newline). Leading and trailing whitespace is ignored. Also, consecutive whitespaces are treated as a single delimiter.

Example:

>>> "   \t\t\none  two    three\t\t\tfour\nfive\n\n".split()
['one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five']

• When a single character delimiter is passed, split() behaves quite differently from its default behavior. In this case, leading/trailing delimiters are not ignored, repeating delimiters are not "coalesced" into one either.

Example:

>>> ",,one,two,three,,\n four\tfive".split(',')
['', '', 'one', 'two', 'three', '', '\n four\tfive']

So, if stripping of whitespaces is desired while splitting a string based on a non-whitespace delimiter, use this construct:

words = [item.strip() for item in string.split(',')]

• When a multi-character string is passed as the delimiter, it is taken as a single delimiter and not as a character class or a set of delimiters.

Example:

>>> "one,two,three,,four".split(',,')
['one,two,three', 'four']

To coalesce multiple delimiters into one, you would need to use re.split(regex, string) approach. See the related posts below.

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Related

• string.split() - Python documentation
• re.split() - Python documentation
• Split string based on regex
• Split string based on a regular expression