Useful Functions: String Functions

Question

I tried splitting 'hi hi hi' wherever it has 'h'. I got the print output as [",'i ','i ','i']. I did not get the logic behind the first entry of this list. Why am I getting 1st entry as empty?
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In [67]: x='hi hi hi'

In [68]: print(x.split('h'))
['', 'i ', 'i ', 'i']
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Answer 1

This is just the behaviour of split() if you specify sep. Analogous to:

"If sep is given, consecutive delimiters are not grouped together and are deemed to delimit empty strings (for example, '1,,2'.split(',') returns ['1', '', '2'])."
- from the Python documentation