Two string methods connect text and lists. .split() breaks text into a list of words, and " ".join(list) glues a list of strings back together with something in between:

sentence = "the quick brown fox"
words = sentence.split()
print(words)
print(len(words), "words")
print("-".join(words))

dates = "2026-10-07".split("-")
print(dates)

.split() with nothing in the brackets splits on any spaces; give it a string and it splits on that instead. split is perfect for reading several values from one line of input:

numbers = input("Numbers separated by spaces: ").split()
total = 0
for n in numbers:
    total += int(n)
print("Total:", total)

Each piece is still a string, so convert each one before doing maths with it.