Dividing string including whitespace blocks

Question

Does exist a command such that splits a string in a way that the whitespaces become a string too?. For example, suppose that the command is "coolsplit":

>>> example='hey,    whats up,     how are you?'
>>> example.coolsplit()
    ['hey,','   ','whats',' ','up,','     ','how',' ','are',' ','you?'] 

Does it exist?

Answer 1

You can do re.split() capturing the delimiter:

>>> import re
>>>
>>> re.split(r'(\s+)', example)
['hey,', '    ', 'whats', ' ', 'up,', '     ', 'how', ' ', 'are', ' ', 'you?']

\s+ here means "one or more whitespace characters", parenthesis define a saving group.