Convert string to list Python

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

In the development process, we may face some scenario where there may need to be performed a data conversion operation. In Python, List is a mostly used data structure, it contains any type of data objects with a 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, a 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 a list using Python's 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, the default separator is any white space. The maxsplit is optional, it specifies how many splits to do.

Example1: Convert string to list

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']

Example2: Convert string to list

In the given example, we split a string into a list on the basis of the given separator.

x_str = 'Welcome-To-EtutorialsPoint'
x_list = list(x_str.split("-"))
print("List of Words = ",x_list)

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

Convert string to list of character

Python string is a sequence of characters. We can convert a string to a list of characters using Python's 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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