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

How about this algorithm? Split text on whitespace, then trim punctuation. This carefully removes punctuation from the edge of words, without harming apostrophes inside words such as we're.

>>> text
"'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'"

>>> text.split()
["'Oh,", 'you', "can't", 'help', "that,'", 'said', 'the', 'Cat:', "'we're", 'all', 'mad', 'here.', "I'm", 'mad.', "You're", "mad.'"]

>>> import string
>>> [word.strip(string.punctuation) for word in text.split()]
['Oh', 'you', "can't", 'help', 'that', 'said', 'the', 'Cat', "we're", 'all', 'mad', 'here', "I'm", 'mad', "You're", 'mad']