Easy way to break up a sentence?

[Padraig Brady]

Ken wrote:
> Hi all, I am trying to do a simple word search engine. Is there an easy way
> to break up a sentence into individual words so that I can use it to compare
> without traversing through every character?
> 
> Eg, something like this:
> from: "This is an example"
> to: ["This", "is", "an", "example"]

You can use "".split() but that will not
deal with punctuation. For that you will
need re.

import re
re.split('\W+', "This is an, example.")

This however will create an empty list item
for the last '.'

You can get around this by using the converse:
re.findall('\w+', "This is an, example.")

Pádraig.