Split by comma and strip whitespace in Python

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.

Split using a regular expression. Note I made the case more general with leading spaces. The list comprehension is to remove the null strings at the front and back.

>>> import re
>>> string = "  blah, lots  ,  of ,  spaces, here "
>>> pattern = re.compile("^\s+|\s*,\s*|\s+$")
>>> print([x for x in pattern.split(string) if x])
['blah', 'lots', 'of', 'spaces', 'here']

This works even if ^\s+ doesn't match:

>>> string = "foo,   bar  "
>>> print([x for x in pattern.split(string) if x])
['foo', 'bar']
>>>

Here's why you need ^\s+:

>>> pattern = re.compile("\s*,\s*|\s+$")
>>> print([x for x in pattern.split(string) if x])
['  blah', 'lots', 'of', 'spaces', 'here']

See the leading spaces in blah?

Clarification: above uses the Python 3 interpreter, but results are the same in Python 2.

Just remove the white space from the string before you split it.

mylist = my_string.replace(' ','').split(',')

I know this has already been answered, but if you end doing this a lot, regular expressions may be a better way to go:

>>> import re
>>> re.sub(r'\s', '', string).split(',')
['blah', 'lots', 'of', 'spaces', 'here']

The \s matches any whitespace character, and we just replace it with an empty string ''. You can find more info here: http://docs.python.org/library/re.html#re.sub