split() and string.whitespace

[Tim Chase]

> I am unable to figure out why the first two statements work as I
> expect them to and the next two do not. Namely, the first two spit the
> sentence into its component words, while the latter two return the
> whole sentence entact.
> 
> import string
> from string import whitespace
> mytext = "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.\n"
> 
> print mytext.split()
> print mytext.split(' ')
> print mytext.split(whitespace)
> print string.split(mytext, sep=whitespace)


Split does its work on literal strings, or if a separator is not 
specified, on a set of data, splits on arbitrary whitespace.

For an example, try

   s = "abcdefgbcdefgh"
   s.split("c") # ['ab', 'defgb', 'defgh']
   s.split("fgb") # ['abcde', 'cdefgh']


string.whitespace is a string, so split() tries to use split on 
the literal whitespace, not a set of whitespace.

-tkc