Python regex for finding all words in a string

Question

Hello I am new into regex and I'm starting out with python. I'm stuck at extracting all words from an English sentence. So far I have:

import re

shop="hello seattle what have you got"
regex = r'(\w*) '
list1=re.findall(regex,shop)
print list1

This gives output:

['hello', 'seattle', 'what', 'have', 'you']

If I replace regex by

regex = r'(\w*)\W*'

then output:

['hello', 'seattle', 'what', 'have', 'you', 'got', '']

whereas I want this output

['hello', 'seattle', 'what', 'have', 'you', 'got']

Please point me where I am going wrong.

Answer 1

Use word boundary \b

import re

shop="hello seattle what have you got"
regex = r'\b\w+\b'
list1=re.findall(regex,shop)
print list1

OP : ['hello', 'seattle', 'what', 'have', 'you', 'got']

or simply \w+ is enough

import re

shop="hello seattle what have you got"
regex = r'\w+'
list1=re.findall(regex,shop)
print list1

OP : ['hello', 'seattle', 'what', 'have', 'you', 'got']