Carl Johnson writes:
what you meant was "I can't imagine new programmers wanting to go into the re module to learn how to do something like string.splitonchars." To which I say: Yes! I heartily agree! :-D
I don't understand this point of view at all. True, regexps are a complex subject, with an unfortunately large number of dialects. Is it the confusion of dialects problem, or do you really never use regexps in any language? Anyway, for this purpose you only have to learn one idiom, that longstring.splitonchars (["x", "y", "z"]) is spelled import re re.split ("[xyz]", longstring) In fact, I personally would like to deprecate the with-argument implementation of string.split(), and have def split (self, delimiter = None): if delimiters is None: return self.usual_magic_splitting () else: import re return re.split (delimiter, self) (of course, that's because that's precisely the way split-string works in Emacs). Then the idiom would be longstring.split ("[xyz]") Would that work for you?