How can I turn a string into a list in Python?

Question

How can I turn a string (like 'hello') into a list (like [h,e,l,l,o])?

Note that the list will be of strings, `['h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o']`. — nmichaels, Sep 22 '11 at 23:11
Strings in Python behave like lists of characters. E.g. `'hello'[1]` -> `'e'`. Are you sure you need a list? — Peter Graham, Sep 22 '11 at 23:43
@PeterGraham: Good point, I've added some description of that to my answer. — Jeremy, Sep 22 '11 at 23:49

Jeremy · Answer 1 · 2011-09-22T23:49:31.570

The list() function ^[docs] will convert a string into a list of single-character strings.

>>> list('hello')
['h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o']

Even without converting them to lists, strings already behave like lists in several ways. For example, you can access individual characters (as single-character strings) using brackets:

>>> s = "hello"
>>> s[1]
'e'
>>> s[4]
'o'

You can also loop over the characters in the string as you can loop over the elements of a list:

>>> for c in 'hello':
...     print c + c,
... 
hh ee ll ll oo

How can I turn a string into a list in Python?

1 Answers1

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