Splitting lines in a file

[Simon Foster]

On 7 Jul 2002 23:14:30 GMT, William Park
<opengeometry at NOSPAM.yahoo.ca> wrote:

>Simon Foster <simon at uggs.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> On 7 Jul 2002 22:30:55 GMT, William Park
>> <opengeometry at NOSPAM.yahoo.ca> wrote:
>> 
>>>'1\n2\n3\n'.split() works as follows:
>>>    1\n2\n3\n -> 1\n2\n3 -> 1 \n 2 \n 3 -> 1 2 3
>>>
>>>'1\n2\n3\n'.split('\n') works as follows:
>>>    1\n2\n3\n -> 1 \n 2 \n 3 \n -> 1 2 3 ''
>>>where the last '\n' separates '3' and '' (null).
>> 
>> Still seems odd!
>
>Not if you try to go backwards:
>    
>    1 2 3 -> 1 \n 2 \n 3 -> 1\n2\n3
>
>    1 2 3 '' -> 1 \n 2 \n 3 \n '' -> 1\n2\n3\n
>
>-- 
>William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry at yahoo.ca>
>8-CPU Cluster, Hosting, NAS, Linux, LaTeX, python, vim, mutt, tin

Don't understand what you mean here.  You started from the same thing
and ended up in two different places.  Am I missing something?

Surely whether I split on newline or arbitrary whitespace should not
matter if the arbitrary whitespace consists _only_ of newlines?