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# with out external libraries as an stupid solution
>>> 'a;bcd,ef g'.replace(';',' ').replace(',',' ').split()
['a', 'bcd', 'ef', 'g']
# with external library
import re
DATA = "Hey, you - what are you doing here!?"
print re.findall(r"[\w']+", DATA)
# Prints ['Hey', 'you', 'what', 'are', 'you', 'doing', 'here']