tokenize a string keeping delimiters in Python

Question

Is there any equivalent to str.split in Python that also returns the delimiters?

I need to preserve the whitespace layout for my output after processing some of the tokens.

Example:

>>> s="\tthis is an  example"
>>> print s.split()
['this', 'is', 'an', 'example']

>>> print what_I_want(s)
['\t', 'this', ' ', 'is', ' ', 'an', '  ', 'example']

Thanks!

Answer 1

How about

import re
splitter = re.compile(r'(\s+|\S+)')
splitter.findall(s)

Answer 2

>>> re.compile(r'(\s+)').split("\tthis is an  example")
['', '\t', 'this', ' ', 'is', ' ', 'an', '  ', 'example']