How to split a string into a list?

Question

I want my Python function to split a sentence (input) and store each word in a list. My current code splits the sentence, but does not store the words as a list. How do I do

Answer 1

Depending on what you plan to do with your sentence-as-a-list, you may want to look at the Natural Language Took Kit. It deals heavily with text processing and evaluation. You can also use it to solve your problem:

import nltk
words = nltk.word_tokenize(raw_sentence)

This has the added benefit of splitting out punctuation.

Example:

>>> import nltk
>>> s = "The fox's foot grazed the sleeping dog, waking it."
>>> words = nltk.word_tokenize(s)
>>> words
['The', 'fox', "'s", 'foot', 'grazed', 'the', 'sleeping', 'dog', ',', 
'waking', 'it', '.']

This allows you to filter out any punctuation you don't want and use only words.

Please note that the other solutions using string.split() are better if you don't plan on doing any complex manipulation of the sentence.

[Edited]