Why is there an empty string, and only one, created when I split a string by "?"

Asked Jun 10 '20 at 20:33

Active Jun 10 '20 at 20:34

Viewed 27 times

I'm working with this code to learn about passing parameters into split(). If I pass "?" into the call to split() on the string y, it's splitting them into a list as you would expect, but it's adding an additional empty string right at the end. This applies whether there is one or more '?' in the string (3 in the example string below.

Can anyone tell me why it's doing this?

It doesn't seem to do this if I pass in a character like 's'.

    y = "Is this a sentence? And is this one? Hm?"
    z = y.split("?")
    print(len(z))
    print(z)
    for w in z:
        print(w)

This is the output:

4
['This is a sentence', ' And is this one', ' Hm', '']
This is a sentence
 And is this one
 Hm

edited Jun 10 '20 at 20:34

asked Jun 10 '20 at 20:33

Jules_ewls

3

Because after the last `'?'` comes an empty string. – timgeb Jun 10 '20 at 20:33
So is there a secret empty string at the end of this/any string? – Jules_ewls Jun 10 '20 at 20:35
1

[Why are empty strings returned in split() results?](//stackoverflow.com/q/2197451) – 001 Jun 10 '20 at 20:36
2

Not secret. `split` gives you what is before and after the `'?'`. There's no characters after the last `'?'`, so it has to give you an empty string. – timgeb Jun 10 '20 at 20:37
wow, thank you for such a clear explanation. – Jules_ewls Jun 10 '20 at 20:44
1

@timgeb your answer is better than any on the linked question/answers. Would be great if you could add it there. – Jules_ewls Jun 10 '20 at 20:54
1

@Jules_ewls https://stackoverflow.com/a/62317388/3620003 I posted in the other topic because this one is closed... – timgeb Jun 11 '20 at 05:03

Why is there an empty string, and only one, created when I split a string by "?"

0 Answers0