List help to split into single entries

[perfringo]

In my data set I seem to have some whitespace in some of the items. Do you know how i can remove this within the same for loop?

If the whitespaces are around arrow then code above takes care of that (it breaks at ' -> '). If there are additional whitespaces (at the beginning or end) then they could be stripped:

>>> lst =  ['A -> B ', ' C -> D', ' E -> F ']                          # note spaces at start and end                                             
>>> new = []                                                                               
>>> for item in lst: 
...    new.extend(chunk.strip() for chunk in item.split(' -> ')) 
...                                                                                        
>>> new                                                                                    
['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F']
>>> [chunk.strip() for item in lst for chunk in item.split(' -> ')]    # same result with list comprehension                      
['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F']