Can Regex groups and * wildcards work together?

Question

Is there any way to combine groups and the * features of regular expressions to act kindof like a tokenizer / splitter. I tried this:

my_str = "foofoofoofoo"
pattern = "(foo)*"
result = re.search(pattern, my_str)

I was hoping my groups might look like

("foo", "foo", "foo", "foo")

But it does not. I was surprised by this because the ? and group features do work together:

my_str= "Mr foo"
pattern = "(Mr)? foo"
result = re.search(pattern, my_str)

Answer 1

The problem is you repeat your only capturing group. That means you have only one bracket ==> one capturing group, and this capturing group is overwritten each time when it matches.

See Repeating a Capturing Group vs. Capturing a Repeated Group on regular-expression.info for more information. (But capturing a repeated group is also not what you want)

So, after your regex is done, your capturing group 1 will contain the last found "foo".

This would would give you the expected result:

my_str = "foofoofoofoo"
pattern = "foo"
result = re.findall(pattern, my_str)

result is then a list ['foo', 'foo', 'foo', 'foo']

Answer 2

Capture groups and * don't work with the built in re module -- use findall instead.

There is a library called regex in pypi that I believe supports that syntax and has a few other features such as variable length back tracking.