CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonregexstringsplitsubstring
Tom
Tom

Reputation: 1291

Best way to split a string in python with multiple separators - while keeping the separators

Suppose I have the string:

string = "this is a test string <LW> I want to <NL>split this string<NL> by each tag I have inserted.<AB>"

I want to split the string by each custom tag I have inserted in the string in a previous function:

tags = ["<LW>", "<NL>", "<AB>"]

This is the desired output:

splitString = splitByTags(string, tags)

for s in splitString:
    print(s)

Output

"this is a test string <LW>"
" I want to <NL>"
"split this string<NL>"
" by each tag I have inserted.<AB>"

So basically I want to split the string by multiple substrings while keeping these substrings within the split. What is the quickest and most efficient way of doing this? I am aware that I can use string.split and simply append the split text to each line however I am unsure how to do this with multiple strings.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 575

Answers (2)

user7313188
user7313188

Reputation:

Here some example how to do this:

import re

def split_string(string, tags):
    string_list = []
    start = 0
    for tag in tags:
        tag_index = re.finditer(tag, string)
        for item in tag_index:
            end_tag = item.start() + len(tag)
            string_list.append(string[start:end_tag])
            start = end_tag

    return string_list



data = split_string(string, tags)

Output:

['this is a test string <LW>', ' I want to <NL>', 'split this string<NL>', ' by each tag I have inserted.<AB>']

Upvotes: 0

Rakesh
Rakesh

Reputation: 82765

Using re.split with capturing parentheses.

Ex:

import re
string = "this is a test string <LW> I want to <NL>split this string<NL> by each tag I have inserted.<AB>"
tags = ["<LW>", "<NL>", "<AB>"]

splt_str = re.split("(" + "|".join(tags) + ")", string)

for i in range(0, len(splt_str), 2):
    print("".join(splt_str[i:i+2]))

Output:

this is a test string <LW>
 I want to <NL>
split this string<NL>
 by each tag I have inserted.<AB>

Upvotes: 3

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