On Dec 12, 2016, at 04:16 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

>So the proposal would be: prune=False -> empty strings stay, prune=True,
>empty strings are dropped, prune=None (default) use True if sep is None,
>False otherwise. Right?

Yep!

>Some end cases:
>
>- ''.split(None, prune=True) -> ['']
>- 'x  x'.split(None, prune=True) -> ['x', '', 'x']
>
>Right?

Isn't that what you'd expect if prune=False instead?  (i.e. prune=True always
drops empty strings from the results)

>While we're here I wish there was a specific argument we could translate
>.split(None) into, e.g. x.split() == x.split((' ', '\t', '\n', '\r', '\f')) #
>or whatever set of strings

Is that the sep=<some tuple> idea that @syeberman suggested earlier?  If so,
then you could do:

>>> x.split(tuple(string.whitespace))

Would that suffice?