How to collapse consecutive delimiters?

Question

The default split method in Python treats consecutive spaces as a single delimiter. But if you specify a delimiter string, consecutive delimiters are not collapsed:

>>> 'aaa'.split('a') ['', '', '', ''] 

What is the most straightforward way to collapse consecutive delimiters? I know I could just remove empty strings from the result list:

>>> result = 'aaa'.split('a') >>> result ['', '', '', ''] >>> result = [item for item in result if item] 

But is there a more convenient way?

Answer 1

This is about as concise as you can get:

string = 'aaa' result = [s for s in string.split('a') if s] 

Or you could switch to regular expressions:

string = 'aaa' result = re.split('a+', string) 

Answer 2

You can use re.split with a regular expression as the delimiter, as in:

re.split(pattern, string[, maxsplit=0, flags=0])