python - How to collapse consecutive delimiters?

Question

The default split method in Python treats consecutive spaces as a single delimiter. But if you specify a delimiter string, consecutive delimiters are not collapsed:

>>> 'aaa'.split('a')
['', '', '', '']

What is the most straightforward way to collapse consecutive delimiters? I know I could just remove empty strings from the result list:

>>> result = 'aaa'.split('a')
>>> result
['', '', '', '']
>>> result = [item for item in result if item]

But is there a more convenient way?

Answer 1

This is about as concise as you can get:

string = 'aaa'
result = [s for s in string.split('a') if s]

Or you could switch to regular expressions:

string = 'aaa'
result = re.split('a+', string)