RegEx- How to make a blank space between a non-alphabetic char and an alphabetic char in a string

Question

I would like to normalize strings of text; and for that reason I want to keep punctuation marks and non-alphabetic characters (not to detete emoticons), but at the same time make a blank space between every two alphabetic and non-alphabetic characters. For example the following strings:

"*I love u*"
"Hi, life is great:)hehe"
"I will go uni.cul"

should be converted to:

"* I love u *"
"Hi , life is great :) hehe"
"I will go to uni . cul"

Could you please tell me how I can write a regular expresion to do this? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can replace the matches of this expression:

(?<=[^\w\s])(?=\w)|(?<=\w)(?=[^\w\s])

with a space .

For example:

re.sub(r'(?<=[^\w\s])(?=\w)|(?<=\w)(?=[^\w\s])', ' ', str)

Answer 2

Try this:

x = '''*I love u*
    Hi, life is great:)hehe
    I will go uni.cul'''

def rep(matchobj):
    return ' ' + matchobj.group(0) + ' '

print re.sub('[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]+', rep, x).strip()