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📚 Introduction to Python Programming
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8.5 Splitting/joining strings

Learning objectives

By the end of this section you should be able to

  • Use the split method to split a string into substrings.
  • Combine objects in a list into a string using join method.

split

A string in Python can be broken into substrings given a delimiter. A delimiter is also referred to as a separator. The split method, when applied to a string, splits the string into substrings by using the given argument as a delimiter. Ex: "1-2".split('-') returns a list of substrings ["1", "2"]. When no arguments are given to the split method, blank space characters are used as delimiters. Ex: "1\t2\n3 4".split returns ["1", "2", "3", "4"].

join

The join method is the inverse of the split method: a list of string values are concatenated together to form one output string. When joining string elements in the list, the delimiter is added in-between elements. Ex: ','.join(["this", "is", "great"]) returns "this,is,great".