Splitting a string with multiple delimiters in Python

Question

I'm using regular expressions to split a string using multiple delimiters. But if two of my delimiters occur next to each other in the string, it puts an empty string in the resulting list. For example:

re.split(',|;', "This,is;a,;string")

Results in

['This', 'is', 'a', '', 'string']

Is there any way to avoid getting '' in my list without adding ,; as a delimiter?

score 33 · Accepted Answer · answered May 01 '12 at 03:22

33

Try this:

import re
re.split(r'[,;]+', 'This,is;a,;string')
> ['This', 'is', 'a', 'string']

answered May 01 '12 at 03:22

Óscar López

232,561
37
312
386

Hmm, okay. Now what if one of my delimiters was also a word? For example: `re.split(',|;|string', "This,is;a,;string")` – David DeMar May 01 '12 at 03:30
2

Then this would work: `re.split(r'[,;]+|string', 'This,is;a,;string')` – Óscar López May 01 '12 at 04:33
1

Now the output would be `['This', 'is', 'a', '', '']` – David DeMar May 01 '12 at 04:38
7

That's normal, you're using multiple separators. If you need to filter empty strings then do this: `[s for s in re.split(r'[,;]+|string', 'This,is;a,;string') if s]` – Óscar López May 01 '12 at 04:45

Splitting a string with multiple delimiters in Python

1 Answers1

Linked

Related