Split by comma and strip whitespace in Python

I came to add:

map(str.strip, string.split(','))

but saw it had already been mentioned by Jason Orendorff in a comment.

Reading Glenn Maynard's comment on the same answer suggesting list comprehensions over map I started to wonder why. I assumed he meant for performance reasons, but of course he might have meant for stylistic reasons, or something else (Glenn?).

So a quick (possibly flawed?) test on my box (Python 2.6.5 on Ubuntu 10.04) applying the three methods in a loop revealed:

$ time ./list_comprehension.py  # [word.strip() for word in string.split(',')]
real    0m22.876s

$ time ./map_with_lambda.py     # map(lambda s: s.strip(), string.split(','))
real    0m25.736s

$ time ./map_with_str.strip.py  # map(str.strip, string.split(','))
real    0m19.428s

making map(str.strip, string.split(',')) the winner, although it seems they are all in the same ballpark.

Certainly though map (with or without a lambda) should not necessarily be ruled out for performance reasons, and for me it is at least as clear as a list comprehension.

Use list comprehension -- simpler, and just as easy to read as a for loop.

my_string = "blah, lots  ,  of ,  spaces, here "
result = [x.strip() for x in my_string.split(',')]
# result is ["blah", "lots", "of", "spaces", "here"]

See: Python docs on List Comprehension
A good 2 second explanation of list comprehension.