"/1/2/3/".split("/")

Question

It's too hot & I'm probably being retarded.

>>> "/1/2/3/".split("/")
['', '1', '2', '3','']

Whats with the empty elements at the start and end?

Edit: Thanks all, im putting this down to heat induced brain failure. The docs aren't quite the clearest though, from http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html

"Return a list of the words in the string, using sep as the delimiter string"

Is there a word before the first, or after the last "/"?

Answer 1

Compare with:

"1/2/3".split("/")

Empty elements are still elements.

You could use strip('/') to trim the delimiter from the beginning/end of your string.

Answer 2

Slashes are separators, so there are empty elements before the first and after the last.

Answer 3

you're splitting on /. You have 4 /, so, the list returned will have 5 elements.

Answer 4

As JLWarlow says, you have an extra '/' in the string. Here's another example:

>>> "//2//3".split('/')
['', '', '2', '', '3']

Answer 5

That is exactly what I would expect, but we are all different :)

What would you expect from: : "1,,2,3".split(",") ?

Answer 6

You can use strip() to get rid of the leading and trailing fields... Then call split() as before.

Answer 7

[x for x in "//1///2/3///".split("/") if x != ""]