Split string with delimiters in Python

Question

I have such a String as an example:

"[greeting] Hello [me] my name is John."

I want to split it and get such a result

('[greetings]', 'Hello' , '[me]', 'my name is John')

Can it be done in one line of code?

OK another example as it seems that many misunderstood the question.

"[greeting] Hello my friends [me] my name is John. [bow] nice to meet you."

then I should get

 ('[greetings]', ' Hello my friends ' , '[me]', ' my name is John. ', '[bow]', ' nice to meet you.')

I basically want to send this kind of string to my robot. It will automatically decompose it and do some motion corresponding to [greetings] [me] and [bow] and in between speak the other strings.

Extracting the delimited words, detecting the position of the opening delimiter '[' and using the length of the extracted words ('greetings' and 'me') to finally split the string the way I want it to be split. But I thought Python has more to offer. — Mehdi
– Mehdi, Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 5:38
it's not possible to do in one line. you have use list with phrases with spaces which will evaluate in one phrase after splitting — Dmitry Zagorulkin
– Dmitry Zagorulkin, Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 5:47

Ashwini Chaudhary · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-24 08:33:53Z

1

Using regex:

>>> import re
>>> s = "[greeting] Hello my friends [me] my name is John. [bow] nice to meet you."
>>> re.findall(r'\[[\w\s.]+\]|[\w\s.]+', s)
['[greeting]', ' Hello my friends ', '[me]', ' my name is John. ', '[bow]', ' nice to meet you.']

Edit:

>>> s =  "I can't see you"
>>> re.findall(r'\[.*?\]|.*?(?=\[|$)', s)[:-1]
["I can't see you"]
>>> s = "[greeting] Hello my friends [me] my name is John. [bow] nice to meet you."
>>> re.findall(r'\[.*?\]|.*?(?=\[|$)', s)[:-1]
['[greeting]', ' Hello my friends ', '[me]', ' my name is John. ', '[bow]', ' nice to meet you.'

edited Jul 24, 2014 at 8:33

answered Jul 24, 2014 at 5:49

Ashwini Chaudhary

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2 Comments

Mehdi Over a year ago

Wow thanks, this is really powerful. I was struggeling with regex to understand its syntax and could only extract the words between the brackets but not the rest.

Mehdi Over a year ago

I have a problem with characters like '^' and "'", If my sentence contains for example "I can't see you" it will be divided to "I can" and "t see you". and '^' is simply ignored.

royhowie · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-24 05:52:13Z

1

The function you're after is .split(). The function accepts a delimiter as its argument and returns a list made by splitting the string at every occurrence of the delimiter. To split a string, using either "[" or "]" as a delimiter, you should use a regular expression:

import re
str = "[greeting] Hello [me] my name is John."
re.split("\]|\[", str)
# returns ['', 'greeting', ' Hello ', 'me', ' my name is John.']

This uses a regular expression to split the string.

\] # escape the right bracket
|  # OR
\[ # escape the left bracket

edited Jul 24, 2014 at 5:52

answered Jul 24, 2014 at 5:37

royhowie

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3 Comments

royhowie Over a year ago

@Mehdi Your question wasn't exactly very clear, but I now see what you're after.

royhowie Over a year ago

@Mehdi Is it important that the "[" and "]" (brackets) are kept?

Mehdi Over a year ago

Not that important, I can delimit my special words using [#word] then # will remain as a marker of special word.

zzantares · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-24 06:06:37Z

0

I think can't be done in one line, you need first split by ], then [:

# Run in the python shell
sentence = "[greeting] Hello [me] my name is John."
for part in sentence.split(']')
  part.split('[')

# Output
['', 'greeting']
[' Hello ', 'me']
[' my name is John.']

answered Jul 24, 2014 at 6:06

zzantares

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