Protect commas on consecutive string.join() and string.split()
<p>Suppose the following code (notice the commas inside the strings):</p>

<pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; a = ['1',",2","3,"]
</code></pre>

<p>I need to concatenate the values into a single string. Naive example:</p>

<pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; b = ",".join(a)
&gt;&gt;&gt; b
'1,,2,3,'
</code></pre>

<p>And later I need to split the resulting object again:</p>

<pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; b.split(',')
['1', '', '2', '3', '']
</code></pre>

<p>However, the result I am looking for is the <em>original</em> list:</p>

<pre><code>['1', ',2', '3,']
</code></pre>

<p>What's the simplest way to protect the commas in this process? The best solution I came up with looks rather ugly.</p>

<p>Note: the comma is just an example. The strings can contain any character. And I can choose other characters as separators.</p>
