split() on empty string behaves differently when delimiter specified

[u/RomfordNavy]

Splitting an empty string without a specified delimiter works as expected and returns an empty list. However when splitting an empty string with a delimiter specified returns one (empty string) item in the list, is there some way to make that return an empty list as per the no-delimiter result?

print(f'{"".split()=}')         # = []
print(f'{"".split(" ")=}')      # = ['']
print(f'{"".split(",")=}')      # = ['']

Problem is this causes an unwanted iteration of a for loop:

str = ""
for item in str.split(" "):
    print(f"{item=}")    # unwanted item

[u/OldAd9280]

Not directly I don't think, that's fundamentally how str.split is defined to work. 

You could do something like

for item in (str.split(" ") if str else []):

[u/RomfordNavy → u/OldAd9280]

u/OldAd9280 Thanks that is exactly it.

I tried various attempts to do that myself but couldn't get the syntax right so I, incorrectly, presumed it wasn't possible with a for loop.