Rereading your message along with your other ones, I see that I misinterpreted it. I thought you meant, "I can't imagine a new programmer wanting something as regex-like as string.splitonchars," but 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 Embarrassedly-yours, Carl
Ron Adam wrote:
These examples was just what a "new" programmer might attempt. I have a feeling that most new programmers do not attempt regular expressions ie.. the re module, until sometime after they have learned the basics of python.
Feel what you like, but I assumed that .split meant .splitonchars when I was learning Python in 2007 and was confused when my script didn't work. I was also confused about why it stopped getting rid of empty strings. And I still don't know how to write regexs, so now I when I want to split on multiple chars, I end up .replace-ing a bunch first, which I recognize to be terribly inefficient, but the scripts are throwaways, so it's hardly worth the time to learn a whole other language first.
-- Carl