split string by arbitrary number of white spaces

Question

I'm trying to find the most pythonic way to split a string like

"some words in a string"

into single words. string.split(' ') works ok but it returns a bunch of white space entries in the list. Of course, I could iterate the list and remove the white spaces but I was wondering if there was a better way?

Answer 1

You can use the regular expression to split string by an arbitrary number of white spaces:-

re.split(r'\s+',string)

\s is short for any whitespace. So \s+ is contiguous whitespace.

To know more about this you can have a look at the following video tutorial:-