Splitting strings in Python without split()

Question

What are other ways to split a string without using the split() method? For example, how could [\'This is a Sentence\'] be split into [\'This\', \'is\', \'a\', \'Sentence\']

Answer 1

A recursive version, breaking out the steps in detail:

def my_split(s, sep=' '):
    s = s.lstrip(sep)
    if sep in s:
        pos = s.index(sep)
        found = s[:pos]
        remainder = my_split(s[pos+1:])
        remainder.insert(0, found)
        return remainder
    else:
        return [s]

print my_split("This is a sentence")

---

Or, the short, one-line form:

def my_split(s, sep=' '):
    return [s[:s.index(sep)]] + my_split(s[s.index(sep)+1:]) if sep in s else [s]