Daniel Ehrenberg wrote: Don't use re.split(' ', somestring), use ' '.split(somestring). That fixes your problem. Only use the re module when you're not just matching a string. Here is the code I tried: # -*- coding: cp1252 -*- row = "Genevieve Camirée" contact = ' '.split(row) print row, contact I get an empty string: Genevieve Camirée [' ']