FWIW, I'd like it if something like this functionality existed in the basic string methods. I'm aware of re.split, but in spite of learning regular expressions two or three times already, I use them so infrequently, I had already forgotten how to make it work and which characters are special characters (I find this the hardest thing to remember with regular expressions). So, I would appreciate it if something like s.multisplit(["-", "_", ","]) existed. Still, there is a simple enough non-regular expressions way of doing such a split: s = s.replace(",", "-").replace("_", "-") items = s.split("-") So, I don't think this is an urgent need. It's more of an "it would be nice if" but I don't know how to square that against the maintenance costs.