what's wrong with the way I am splitting a string in python?

Question

I looked in my book and in the documentation, and did this:

a = "hello"
b = a.split(sep= ' ')
print(b)

I get an error saying split() takes no keyword arguments. What is wrong?

I want to have ['h','e','l','l','o'] I tried not passing sep and just a.split(' '), and got ['hello']

Answer 1

Python allows a concept called "keyword arguments", where you tell it which parameter you're passing in the call to the function. However, the standard split() function does not take this kind of parameter.

To split a string into a list of characters, use list():

>>> a = "hello"
>>> list(a)
['h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o']

---

As an aside, an example of keyword parameters might be:

def foo(bar, baz=0, quux=0):
    print "bar=", bar
    print "baz=", baz
    print "quux=", quux

You can call this function in a few different ways:

foo(1, 2, 3)
foo(1, baz=2, quux=3)
foo(1, quux=3, baz=2)

Notice how you can change the order of keyword parameters.