The main goal of this paper is to show that discrete mollification is a suitable ingredient in operator splitting methods for the numerical solution of nonlinear convection-diffusion equations. In order to achieve this goal, we substitute the second step of the operator splitting method of Karlsen and Risebro (1997) [1] for a mollification step and prove that the convergence features are fairly well preserved. We end the paper with illustrative numerical experiments. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.