4.8 Splitting and stripping

Suppose you have the text

text = "  SPECIAL  #  SALE  #  TODAY  "

and you want to break it into a list containing the three words. First, use split to break the string at the hash marks.

text.split('#')

['  SPECIAL  ', '  SALE  ', '  TODAY  ']

Second, remove the whitespace from the left and right of each word with strip. In one line:

[word.strip() for word in text.split('#')]

['SPECIAL', 'SALE', 'TODAY']

Exercise 4.6

Try to rewrite strip using replace. Does it work for embedded spaces as in " How are you? "?

lstrip and rstrip remove the white space from only the left and right sides, respectively.

[word.lstrip() for word in text.split('#')]

['SPECIAL  ', 'SALE  ', 'TODAY ...