I am trying to split a line of text that looks something like this
host=randomhostid123 moreinfo id=otherstuffhere version="morestuff" type=TYPEA::TYPEB
i am tying to use split to parse it into
host=randomhostid123 moreinfo
id=otherstuffhere
version="morestuff"
type=TYPEA::TYPEB
to do this I was using
str.split('?[a-zA-Z]*=')
but all this is producing is the original string all over again I think the regex looks ok, but I am new to python regex
You are using str.split(). What you want is re.split:
re.split(r'\s+(?=[a-zA-Z]+=)', str)
This will split on spaces which are followed by words which in turn are immediately followed by =. Note, that you have to put everything but the spaces in a lookahead, so that it is not swallowed by the split operation.
str.split, not string.split.The ? in your regex is being parsed literally, and since there's no ? in your string it doesn't split. I think you may have been going for a regex lookahead match, but string.split doesn't support regexes.
Ah—too long looking at the documentation! m.buettner summarized things very nicely.
str. That's the name of the built-in type, and the function you use to convert things to strings. For example, you won't be able to dostr(2)to get'2'if you've replaced the function with a string.