how to make punctuation a separate item when using split()

Question

I'm writing a program that compresses text by replicating it with a sequence of numbers - but I don't know how to get the program to recognise punctuation as a separate item in the list.

eg, in this sentence with a comma, the comma means that the words 'comma,' and 'comma' are different when using split(). I want to have 'comma' ',' 'comma' instead.

I don't want to get rid of the punctuation - i want it as a separate item in a list

Just [remove the punctuation](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/265960/best-way-to-strip-punctuation-from-a-string-in-python) before you split maybe? — OneCricketeer, Nov 10 '16 at 20:18
@cricket_007 But they want to keep the punctuation in the post-split list — Patrick Haugh, Nov 10 '16 at 20:19

Francisco · Answer 1 · 2016-11-10T22:07:14.600

3

You can use re.split like this:

>>> re.split('([{}])'.format(re.escape(string.punctuation)), "comma,comma")
['comma', ',', 'comma']

edited Nov 10 '16 at 22:07

answered Nov 10 '16 at 20:22

Francisco

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Its kind of fortuitous that the backslash character in `string.punctuation` immediately precedes `']'`, that `'^'` isn't at the beginning of the character set, that `'[,-.]'` defines a character range which includes a literal hyphen, and etc. So this ends up handling everything properly except for backslashes--although I doubt it matters in practice (who uses backslashes in normal text?). If splitting on backslashes do matter, `re.escape(string.punctuation)` will fix this. – Nov 10 '16 at 21:20

how to make punctuation a separate item when using split()

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