How to split a string using an empty separator in Python

Question

What is a good way to do some_string.split('') in python? This syntax gives an error:

a = '1111' a.split('')  ValueError: empty separator 

I would like to obtain:

['1', '1', '1', '1'] 

Answer 1

Use list():

>>> list('1111') ['1', '1', '1', '1'] 

Alternatively, you can use map() (Python 2.7 only):

>>> map(None, '1111') ['1', '1', '1', '1'] 

Time differences:

$ python -m timeit "list('1111')" 1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.483 usec per loop $ python -m timeit "map(None, '1111')" 1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.431 usec per loop 

Answer 2

One can cast strings to list directly

>>> list('1111') ['1', '1', '1', '1'] 

or using list comprehensions

>>> [i for i in '1111'] ['1', '1', '1', '1'] 

second way can be useful if one wants to split strings for substrings more than 1 symbol length

>>> some_string = '12345' >>> [some_string[i:i+2] for i in range(0, len(some_string), 2)] ['12', '34', '5']