We can also split strings using escape sequences. Escape sequences are used to indicate that we want to split by something in a string that is not necessarily a character. The two escape sequences we will cover here are

• \n Newline
• \t Horizontal Tab

Newline or \n will allow us to split a multi-line string by line breaks and \t will allow us to split a string by tabs. \t is particularly useful when dealing with certain datasets because it is not uncommon for data points to be separated by tabs.

Let’s take a look at an example of splitting by an escape sequence:

smooth_chorus = \
"""And if you said, "This life ain't good enough."
I would give my world to lift you up
I could change my life to better suit your mood
Because you're so smooth"""

chorus_lines = smooth_chorus.split('\n')

print(chorus_lines)

This code is splitting the multi-line string at the newlines (\n) which exist at the end of each line and saving it to a new list called chorus_lines. Then it prints chorus_lines which will produce the output

['And if you said, "This life ain\'t good enough."', 'I would give my world to lift you up', 'I could change my life to better suit your mood', "Because you're so smooth"]

The new list contains each line of the original string as its own smaller string. Also, notice that Python automatically escaped the ' character in the first line and adjusted to double quotation marks to allow the apostrophe on last line when it created the new list.