按特定顺序用多个定界符分割字符串

Question

I am dealing with a type of ASCII file where there are effectively 4 columns of data and the each row is assigned to a line in the file. Below is an example of a row of data from this file

'STOP.F 11966.0000:STOP DEPTH'

The data is always structured so that the delimiter between the first and second column is a period, the delimiter between the second and third column is a space and the delimiter between the third and fourth column is a colon.

Ideally, I would like to find a way to return the following result from the string above

['STOP', 'F', '11966.0000', 'STOP DEPTH']

I tried using a regular expression with the period, space and colon as delimiters, but it breaks down (see example below) because I don't know how to specify the specific order in which to split the string, and I don't know if there is a way to specify the maximum number of splits per delimiter right in the regular expression itself. I want it to split the delimiters in the specific order and each delimiter a maximum of 1 time.

import re
line = 'STOP.F 11966.0000:STOP DEPTH'
re.split("[. :]", line)
>>> ['STOP', 'F', '11966', '0000', 'STOP', 'DEPTH']

Any suggestions on a tidy way to do this?

Answer 1

This may work. Credit to Juan

import re
pattern = re.compile(r'^(.+)\.(.+) (.+):(.+)$')
line = 'STOP.F 11966.0000:STOP DEPTH'
pattern.search(line).groups()
Out[6]: ('STOP', 'F', '11966.0000', 'STOP DEPTH')

Answer 2

re.split() solution with specific regex pattern:

import re

s = 'STOP.F 11966.0000:STOP DEPTH'
result = re.split(r'(?<=^[^.]+)\.|(?<=^[^ ]+) |:', s)

print(result)

The output:

['STOP', 'F', '11966.0000', 'STOP DEPTH']