How to split a string into an array of characters in Python?

Question

I\'ve tried to look around the web for answers to splitting a string into an array of characters but I can\'t seem to find a simple method

str.split(//)

Answer 1

from itertools import chain

string = 'your string'
chain(string)

similar to list(string) but returns a generator that is lazily evaluated at point of use, so memory efficient.

Answer 2

You take the string and pass it to list()

s = "mystring"
l = list(s)
print l

Answer 3

You can also do it in this very simple way without list():

>>> [c for c in "foobar"]
['f', 'o', 'o', 'b', 'a', 'r']

Answer 4

You can use extend method in list operations as well.

>>> list1 = []
>>> list1.extend('somestring')
>>> list1
['s', 'o', 'm', 'e', 's', 't', 'r', 'i', 'n', 'g']

Answer 5

I explored another two ways to accomplish this task. It may be helpful for someone.

The first one is easy:

In [25]: a = []
In [26]: s = 'foobar'
In [27]: a += s
In [28]: a
Out[28]: ['f', 'o', 'o', 'b', 'a', 'r']

And the second one use map and lambda function. It may be appropriate for more complex tasks:

In [36]: s = 'foobar12'
In [37]: a = map(lambda c: c, s)
In [38]: a
Out[38]: ['f', 'o', 'o', 'b', 'a', 'r', '1', '2']

For example

# isdigit, isspace or another facilities such as regexp may be used
In [40]: a = map(lambda c: c if c.isalpha() else '', s)
In [41]: a
Out[41]: ['f', 'o', 'o', 'b', 'a', 'r', '', '']

See python docs for more methods

Answer 6

I you just need an array of chars:

arr = list(str)

If you want to split the str by a particular str:

# str = "temp//temps" will will be ['temp', 'temps']
arr = str.split("//")