正则表达式在以字符结尾的单词开头分割

Question

I am again trying to work out how to split a string in Python, which has the following type of format:

'aaaa bbbb cccc:dd eeee:ff ggg hhhh iiii:jjjj kkkk:llll:mm nnn:ooo pppp qqqq:rrr'

into the following list items:

'aaaa bbbb' 
'cccc:dd'
'eeee:ff ggg hhhh'
'iiii:jjjj'
'kkkk:
'llll:mm'
'nnn:ooo pppp'
'qqqq:rrr'

I am looking to split at the start of the word that ends with a colon (':')

Any suggestions would be much appreciated :)

Answer 1

Following works for the provided example:

import re

string = 'aaaa bbbb cccc:dd eeee:ff ggg hhhh iiii:jjjj kkkk:llll:mm nnn:ooo pppp qqqq:rrr'
result = []

# split the string at each word followed by a colon
# wrap regex pattern as group so it is added to result list
parts = re.split("(\w+:)", string)

# if anything was previous to first delimitation token
# add it to results
if parts[0]:
    result.append(parts[0].strip())

# create pairs of a delimitation token and next string
# start from first delimitation token (list index 1)
groups = zip(*[parts[i+1::2] for i in range(2)])

# join each pair to one string and strip spacing
result.extend(["".join(group).strip() for group in groups])

print(result)