Split() function uses whitespace string as separator and removes the empty strings, so I think there is no use using strip() or rstrip() function to remove extra whitespace in head or tail. And here is my example:

a = ' \n 1 2 3 4 \n\n 5 \n\n \t' b = a.rstrip().split() c = a.split() print('b =',b) print('c =',c)

The result turns out to be:

b = ['1', '2', '3', '4', '5'] c = ['1', '2', '3', '4', '5']

It seems that there is no difference in betweeen. However, the former one( intput().strip().split()) seems more widely used. So what is the difference in these two expressions?

0

1 Answer

There's no difference. split() ignores whitespace on the ends of the input by default. People call strip() first either because they think it's clearer or because they don't know this behavior of split().

Docs:

If sep is not specified or is None, a different splitting algorithm is applied: runs of consecutive whitespace are regarded as a single separator, and the result will contain no empty strings at the start or end if the string has leading or trailing whitespace. Consequently, splitting an empty string or a string consisting of just whitespace with a None separator returns [].

3