How to collapse consecutive delimiters?

You can use re.split with a regular expression as the delimiter, as in:

re.split(pattern, string[, maxsplit=0, flags=0])

You could use regular expressions:

re.split(pattern, string[, maxsplit=0, flags=0])

as

re.split('a+', 'aaa')

This is about as concise as you can get:

string = 'aaa'
result = [s for s in string.split('a') if s]

Or you could switch to regular expressions:

string = 'aaa'
result = re.split('a+', string)