Separate strings and integers in Python

Question

I want to split the strings and the numbers. So if the string that is concatenated would be:

Hans went to house number 10 92384 29349

It should split the text into:

Hans went to house number | 10 | 92384 | 29349

I am confused on how to tackle this as split won't work because it will also split Hans | went | to | house | number..

Answer 1

Pretty easy with regular expressions:

>>> import re
>>> s = "Hans went to house number 10 92384 29349"
>>> re.split(r'\s+(?=\d+\b)', s)
['Hans went to house number', '10', '92384', '29349']

That said your question is confusing, if you want to add the | char to the output, simply join the output again:

>>> ' | '.join(_)
'Hans went to house number | 10 | 92384 | 29349'

If your goal is to implement a function that does the trick, you can write this:

def split_numbers(string, join=None):
   from re import split
   split = re.split(r'\s+(?=\d+\b)', string)
   return join.join(split) if join else split

Notice that I added the word boundary \b on my regex to avoid matching words starting with a number like the 2cups in the sentence Hans went to house number 10 92384 29349 and drank 2cups of coffee