Convert string to list Python

In this post, you will learn different ways to convert a string to a list using Python programming language.

In the development process, we may face some scenario where there may be need to perform data conversion operation. In Python, List is mostly used data structure, it contains any type of data objects with comma separated and enclosed within a square bracket. A single list may contain data types like Integers, Strings, as well as Objects or even another list inside a list. In Python, string is used for representing characters. Strings are immutable, indexable, iterable. There are several ways to convert a string to a list, like using split()method.

Using split() method

We can convert a string to list using Python inbuilt split() method. This method splits a string and stores them in the list. The syntax of split() method is -

string.split(separator, maxsplit)

You can specify the separator, default separator is any whitespace. The maxsplit is optional, it specifies how many splits to do. Here is the simple example where we convert a string to a list of words with the separator as white spaces.

str1 = 'Welcome To EtutorialsPoint'
print(f'List of Words ={str1.split()}')

List of Words =['Welcome', 'To', 'EtutorialsPoint']

Convert string to list of character

Python string is a sequence of characters. We can convert string to list of characters using Python inbuilt list() function. While converting, all whitespaces are also treated as characters. Here is an example to demonstrate this -

str1 = 'Welcome To EtutorialsPoint'
print(f'List of Words ={list(s)}')

List of Words =['W', 'e', 'l', 'c', 'o', 'm', 'e', ' ', 'T', 'o', ' ', 'E', 't', 'u', 't', 'o', 'r', 'i', 'a', 'l', 's', 'P', 'o', 'i', 'n', 't']

We can remove the leading and trailing whitespaces using Python inbuilt strip() method -

str1 = ' etutorialspoint '
print(f'List of Words ={list(str1.strip())}')

List of Words =['e', 't', 'u', 't', 'o', 'r', 'i', 'a', 'l', 's', 'p', 'o', 'i', 'n', 't']

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