Python Split String into List

In this tutorial, we will discuss the methods to split a string into a list.

Python string has split() method it can be used to split the string into a list.

str.split(sep=None, maxsplit=-1)

seperator – seperator used to split the string, it can be a character or multiple characters (optional)
maxsplit – Number of splits to do, maxsplit+1 elements in the output list (optional)

Returns a list of words in the string.

Simple split example

# string to split
message = "welcome to python programming examples"
word_list = message.split()

print(word_list)

Output

['welcome', 'to', 'python', 'programming', 'examples']

Character separator

pro_langs = "cpp,python,java,,go,kotlin,php"
#Comma as seperator
lang_list = pro_langs.split(",")

print(lang_list)

Output

['cpp', 'python', 'java', '', 'go', 'kotlin', 'php']

Multiple characters as a separator

nums = "100<>201<>300<>404<>203<>300"
#"<>" as seperator
numbers = nums.split("<>")
print(numbers)

Output

[‘100’, ‘201’, ‘300’, ‘404’, ‘203’, ‘300’]

Using max split parameter

pro_langs = "cpp,python,java,,go,kotlin,php"

lang_list = pro_langs.split(",", 2)
print(lang_list)

Output

['cpp', 'python', 'java,,go,kotlin,php']

From the above output, we got max_split+1(3) elements in the list.

Convert a string to a list of characters in Python

Method 1: To convert a string into a list of characters we can use a list constructor.

txt = "World"
chrs = list(txt)
print(chrs)

Output

[‘W’, ‘o’, ‘r’, ‘l’, ‘d’]

Method 2: Using list comprehension.

txt = "World"
chrs = list(txt)
print(chrs)

Output

[‘W’, ‘o’, ‘r’, ‘l’, ‘d’]

It is easy to split strings into a list in python using the split function. You can read about list append vs extend function performance here.