Regex divide with upper-case

Question

I would like to replace strings like 'HDMWhoSomeThing' to 'HDM Who Some Thing' with regex.

So I would like to extract words which starts with an upper-case letter or consist of upper-case letters only. Notice that in the string 'HDMWho' the last upper-case letter is in the fact the first letter of the word Who - and should not be included in the word HDM.

What is the correct regex to achieve this goal? I have tried many regex' similar to [A-Z][a-z]+ but without success. The [A-Z][a-z]+ gives me 'Who Some Thing' - without 'HDM' of course.

Any ideas? Thanks, Rukki

Answer 1

#! /usr/bin/env python

import re
from collections import deque

pattern = r'([A-Z]{2,}(?=[A-Z]|$)|[A-Z](?=[a-z]|$))'
chunks = deque(re.split(pattern, 'HDMWhoSomeMONKEYThingXYZ'))

result = []
while len(chunks):
  buf = chunks.popleft()
  if len(buf) == 0:
    continue
  if re.match(r'^[A-Z]$', buf) and len(chunks):
    buf += chunks.popleft()
  result.append(buf)

print ' '.join(result)

Output:

HDM Who Some MONKEY Thing XYZ

Judging by lines of code, this task is a much more natural fit with re.findall:

pattern = r'([A-Z]{2,}(?=[A-Z]|$)|[A-Z][a-z]*)'
print ' '.join(re.findall(pattern, 'HDMWhoSomeMONKEYThingX'))

Output:

HDM Who Some MONKEY Thing X