Why does split() return more elements than split(“ ”) on same string?

Question

I am using split() and split(\" \") on the same string. But why is split(\" \") returning less number of elements than split()

Answer 1

In Python, the split function splits on a specific string if specified, otherwise on spaces (and then you can access the result list by index as usual):

s = "Hello world! How are you?"
s.split() 
Out[9]:['Hello', 'world!', 'How', 'are', 'you?']
s.split("!")
Out[10]: ['Hello world', ' How are you?'] 
s.split("!")[0] 
Out[11]: 'Hello world'