Python regex string expansion

Question

Suppose I have the following string:

trend  = '(A|B|C)_STRING'

I want to expand this to:

A_STRING
B_STRING
C_STRING

The OR condition can be anywhere in the string. i.e STRING_(A|B)_STRING_(C|D)

would expand to

STRING_A_STRING_C
STRING_B_STRING C
STRING_A_STRING_D
STRING_B_STRING_D

I also want to cover the case of an empty conditional:

(|A_)STRING would expand to:

A_STRING
STRING

Here's what I've tried so far:

def expandOr(trend):
    parenBegin = trend.index('(') + 1
    parenEnd = trend.index(')')
    orExpression = trend[parenBegin:parenEnd]
    originalTrend = trend[0:parenBegin - 1]
    expandedOrList = []

    for oe in orExpression.split("|"):
        expandedOrList.append(originalTrend + oe)

But this is obviously not working.

Is there any easy way to do this using regex?

Answer 1

Here's a pretty clean way. You'll have fun figuring out how it works :-)

def expander(s):
    import re
    from itertools import product
    pat = r"\(([^)]*)\)"
    pieces = re.split(pat, s)
    pieces = [piece.split("|") for piece in pieces]
    for p in product(*pieces):
        yield "".join(p)

Then:

for s in ('(A|B|C)_STRING',
          '(|A_)STRING',
          'STRING_(A|B)_STRING_(C|D)'):
    print s, "->"
    for t in expander(s):
        print "   ", t

displays:

(A|B|C)_STRING ->
    A_STRING
    B_STRING
    C_STRING
(|A_)STRING ->
    STRING
    A_STRING
STRING_(A|B)_STRING_(C|D) ->
    STRING_A_STRING_C
    STRING_A_STRING_D
    STRING_B_STRING_C
    STRING_B_STRING_D

Answer 2

import exrex
trend  = '(A|B|C)_STRING'
trend2 = 'STRING_(A|B)_STRING_(C|D)'

>>> list(exrex.generate(trend))
[u'A_STRING', u'B_STRING', u'C_STRING']

>>> list(exrex.generate(trend2))
[u'STRING_A_STRING_C', u'STRING_A_STRING_D', u'STRING_B_STRING_C', u'STRING_B_STRING_D']