Behavior of re.split on empty strings is unexpected

[John Nagle]

On 8/2/2010 5:53 PM, samwyse wrote:
> On Aug 2, 12:34 pm, John Nagle<na... at animats.com>  wrote:
>> The regular expression "split" behaves slightly differently than string
>> split:
>
> I'm going to argue that it's the string split that's behaving oddly.

    I tend to agree.

    It doesn't seem to be possible to get the same semantics with
any regular expression split.  The default "split" has a special
case for head and tail whitespace, and there's no way to express
that with a regular expression split.  Applying "strip" first
will work, of course.  The documentation should reflect
that.

				John Nagle