How do I turn colon separated values into comma separated values in python?

Question

If i have a string of words separated by colons or hyphens what would be the best method of putting them into a list?

string = ('car:boat:motorcycle:plane') 

into

list = ['car', 'boat', 'motorcycle', 'plane']

Answer 1

Use the split method and pass the separator

string.split(":")

Default separator is any whitespace.

An optional second argument, maxsplit, will tell Python to split only that number of times:

string.split(":", 2) results in ['car', 'boat', 'motorcycle:plane']