Split string by ' and -

Question

How do split string by apostrophe ' and - ?

For example, given

string = "pete - he's a boy"

`[item.split("'") for item in string.split('-')]` Is what I came up with, not really an answer though... — Jakob Bowyer, May 05 '11 at 07:56
using `'\W+'` works here, but in general it's wrong. And note that `r'\W+'` is more robust, see [documentation about string literals](http://docs.python.org/reference/lexical_analysis.html#string-literals) — Uwe Kleine-König, May 05 '11 at 09:27
@JakobBowyer: The result of your suggestion yields a list of lists, which (I think) isn't the intention here. — Uwe Kleine-König, May 20 '22 at 06:01

score 18 · Accepted Answer · edited May 18 '22 at 19:13

18

You can use the regular expression module's split function:

re.split("['-]", "pete - he's a boy")

edited May 18 '22 at 19:13

wjandrea

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answered May 05 '11 at 07:58

Uwe Kleine-König

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that doesn´t work you need to escape the characters like one answer below =P – fceruti May 05 '11 at 08:03
@fceruti You only need to escape the single-quote if you're using a single-quoted string, but this string is double-quoted. The hyphen doesn't need to be escaped at all. – wjandrea May 18 '22 at 19:17

score 9 · Answer 2 · answered May 05 '11 at 08:00

9

string = "pete - he's a boy"
result = string.replace("'", "-").split("-")
print result

['pete ', ' he', 's a boy']

answered May 05 '11 at 08:00

Cédric Julien

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Thats a cute way of working it out. – Jakob Bowyer May 05 '11 at 08:02
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Anything to avoid using regular expressions ;D – zeekay May 05 '11 at 08:05
works fine. I guess it depends on the size of the string to split if this one is faster or the re.split approach. – Uwe Kleine-König May 05 '11 at 08:20
They can be useful. In moderation. – Jakob Bowyer May 05 '11 at 08:20
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Clean and efficient !!! – undetected Selenium Aug 22 '18 at 20:46

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered May 05 '11 at 08:01

2

This feels kind of hacky but you could do:

string.replace("-", "'").split("'")

answered May 05 '11 at 08:01

zeekay

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equivalent to [slightly earlier answer](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5894392/python-split-string-by-and/5894465#5894465) – Uwe Kleine-König May 05 '11 at 08:14

mmmmmm · Answer 4 · 2018-04-30T22:05:07.113

This can be done without regular expressions. Use the split method on string ( and using list comprehensions - effectively the same as @Cédric Julien's earlier answer

First split once on one splitter e.g. '-' then split each element of the array

l = [x.split("'") for x in "pete - he's a boy".split('-')]

Then flattern the lists

print ( [item for m in l for item in m ] )

giving

['pete ', ' he', 's a boy']

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered May 05 '11 at 08:00

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>>> import re
>>> string = "pete - he's a boy"
>>> re.split('[\'\-]', string)
['pete ', ' he', 's a boy']

Hope this helps :)

answered May 05 '11 at 08:00

fceruti

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It might be an idea to check for other peoples answers first. @Uwe has already provided a suitable re expression. – Jakob Bowyer May 05 '11 at 08:02
Im sorry, when I wrote it, it said no one has posted yet. But anyway, their is an error in his answer. – fceruti May 05 '11 at 08:04
Note I used double quotes for the pattern argument, so there is no need to quote. – Uwe Kleine-König May 05 '11 at 08:18
Oh, thanks, now I´ve learned one thing :) (double quotes) – fceruti May 05 '11 at 08:32

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered May 05 '11 at 08:39

import re
string = "pete - he's a boy"
print re.findall("[^'-]+",string)

result

['pete ', ' he', 's a boy']

.

and if you want no blank before nor after each item after spliting:

import re
string = "pete - he's a boy"
print re.findall("[^'-]+",string)
print re.findall("(?! )[^'-]+(?<! )",string)

result

['pete', 'he', 's a boy']

Split string by ' and -

6 Answers6