Fast way to split alpha and numeric chars in a python string

Question

I am trying to work out a simple function to capture typos, e.g:

"Westminister15" "Westminister15London" "23Westminister15London" 

after fixating:

["Westminister", "15"] ["Westminister", "15", "London"] ["23", "Westminister", "15", "London"] 

First attempt:

 def fixate(query):      digit_pattern = re.compile(r'\D')      alpha_pattern = re.compile(r'\d')      digits = filter(None, digit_pattern.split(query))      alphas = filter(None, alpha_pattern.split(query))      print digits      print alphas 

result:

 fixate("Westminister15London")   > ['15']  > ['Westminister', 'London'] 

However, I think this could be done more effectively, and I still get bad results when I try something like:

 fixate("Westminister15London England")   > ['15']  > ['Westminister', 'London England'] 

Obviously it should enlist London and England separately, but I feel my function will get overly patched and theres a simpler approach

This question is somewhat equivalent to this php question

Answer 1

The problem is that Python's re.split() doesn't split on zero-length matches. But you can get the desired result with re.findall():

>>> re.findall(r"[^\W\d_]+|\d+", "23Westminister15London") ['23', 'Westminister', '15', 'London'] >>> re.findall(r"[^\W\d_]+|\d+", "Westminister15London England") ['Westminister', '15', 'London', 'England'] 

\d+ matches any number of digits, [^\W\d_]+ matches any word.