Is it OK to post small feature requests directly to this list, or is there some other mechanism for them? What I have in mind certainly isn't worth a PEP.

The .split method on strings splits at whitespace by default, but takes an optional argument allowing splitting by other strings. The .strip method (and its siblings) always strip whitespace - on more than one occasion I would have found it useful if these methods also took an optional argument allowing other strings to be stripped. For example, to strip, say, asterisks from a file you could do:

Does this sound sensible/useful?

Cheers, Simon Brunning.

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