text.split() without params and text.split(" ") with space are working differently

[asadbek204]

Bug report

Bug description:

text = "Hello  World  ! "
print(text.split())
print(text.split(" "))

CPython versions tested on:

3.14, 3.12, 3.13

Operating systems tested on:

No response

[picnixz]

It's documented:

If sep is not specified or is None, a different splitting algorithm is applied: runs of consecutive whitespace are regarded as a single separator, and the result will contain no empty strings at the start or end if the string has leading or trailing whitespace. Consequently, splitting an empty string or a string consisting of just whitespace with a None separator returns [].

[gvanrossum]

You're right, they are different. Fortunately this isn't a bug -- it's is by design. You can read it the docs here: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.split