Splitting a string based on a certain set of words

Question

I have a list of strings like such,

['happy_feet', 'happy_hats_for_cats', 'sad_fox_or_mad_banana','sad_pandas_and_happy_cats_for_people'] 

Given a keyword list like ['for', 'or', 'and'] I want to be able to parse the list into another list where if the keyword list occurs in the string, split that string into multiple parts.

For example, the above set would be split into

['happy_feet', 'happy_hats',  'cats', 'sad_fox', 'mad_banana', 'sad_pandas', 'happy_cats', 'people']

Currently I've split each inner string by underscore and have a for loop looking for an index of a key word, then recombining the strings by underscore. Is there a quicker way to do this?

Answer 1

>>> pat = re.compile("_(?:%s)_"%"|".join(sorted(split_list,key=len)))
>>> list(itertools.chain(pat.split(line) for line in data))

will give you the desired output for the example dataset provided

actually with the _ delimiters you dont really need to sort it by length so you could just do

>>> pat = re.compile("_(?:%s)_"%"|".join(split_list))
>>> list(itertools.chain(pat.split(line) for line in data))

Answer 2

>>> [re.split(r"_(?:f?or|and)_", s) for s in l]
[['happy_feet'],
 ['happy_hats', 'cats'],
 ['sad_fox', 'mad_banana'],
 ['sad_pandas', 'happy_cats', 'people']]

To combine them into a single list, you can use

result = []
for s in l:
    result.extend(re.split(r"_(?:f?or|and)_", s))