Split string by multiple delimiters, ignore repeating delimiters

Question

I'm trying to parse a string that has multiple delimiters which may be repeating.

Input string: "-abc,-def,ghi-jkl,mno"

Expected return: ["abc", "def", "ghi", "jkl", "mno"]

I've tried

re.split(",|-", string)

But the return is:

['', 'abc', '', 'def', 'ghi', 'jkl', 'mno']

I think you want to use a quantifier `[,-]+` or match instead of split — The fourth bird, Sep 14 '20 at 20:52
Does this answer your question? [Split string with multiple delimiters in Python](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4998629/split-string-with-multiple-delimiters-in-python) — ndogac, Sep 14 '20 at 20:56

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 14 '20 at 20:52

4

Use re.findall:

re.findall(r'[^-,]+', string)

Python code:

import re
regex = r"[^,-]+"
string = "-abc,-def,ghi-jkl,mno"
print(re.findall(regex, string))

Result: ['abc', 'def', 'ghi', 'jkl', 'mno']

answered Sep 14 '20 at 20:52

Ryszard Czech

DevCl9 · Answer 2 · 2020-09-14T21:01:50.687

1

You can filter the result like this

>>> list(filter(len, re.split(r"[,|-]+", s)))
['abc', 'def', 'ghi', 'jkl', 'mno']

edited Sep 14 '20 at 21:01

answered Sep 14 '20 at 20:56

DevCl9

2 Answers2