How to Split a String in Python

In short, the split() methods allows you to easily split a string into a list. In this guide, we’ll see how to split a string in Python.

Split a String in Python with split()

By default, every word is a list item. To split a string in python we use the split() method.

In the following example, we will define text variable, use the split() method to split it, and then we will print it:

text = "Linux is awesome"

x = text.split()

print(x)

output

['Linux', 'is', 'awesome']

Custom separator

By default the separator when using the split method, is whitespace, but, we can specify it. In the following example we’ll specify that at each slash (/) we will make a split():

text = "linux/is/so/good"

v = text.split("/")

print(v)

output

['linux', 'is', 'so', 'good']

Custom amount of Splits

By default value for the amount of splits is -1, which is all occurrences. We can specify the amount of splits we’d like to do with specifying the maxsplit:

string.split(separator, maxsplit)

In the following example, we’ll set the maxsplit to 1, meaning that it will only split the list into two elements:

text = "linux/is/so/good"


v = text.split("/", 1)

print(v)

output

['linux', 'is/so/good']

Summary

This guide focused on how you can easily split a string in python. As well as specify the separator, and amount of splits.