How to parse a string completely into a list

[Matt Nordhoff]

john.ford at colorado.edu wrote:
> On Sep 24, 9:44 pm, "Chris Rebert" <c... at rebertia.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 8:30 PM,  <john.f... at colorado.edu> wrote:
>>> I want to take a long alpha-numeric string with \n and white-space and
>>> place ALL elements of the string (even individual parts of a long
>>> white-space) into separate list elements. The most common way I've
>>> seen this performed is with the split() function, however I don't
>>> believe that it has the power to do what I am looking for.
>>> Any suggestions?
>>> thanks
>> Could you please define exactly what you mean by "elements" of a string?
>>
>> If you mean characters, then just use list():>>> list("  \n \t abc")
>>
>> [' ', ' ', '\n', ' ', '\t', ' ', 'a', 'b', 'c']
>>
>> Regards,
>> Chris
> 
> Worked like a charm.
> kudos!

Why do you need to convert it to a list? Strings are sequences, so you
can do things like slice them or iterate through them by character:

>>> for character in "foo":
...     print character
...
f
o
o
>>>
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