Python regular expression simple OR condition doesn't work?

Question

I am trying to write a simple regular expression in Python that recognizes either a comma or a newline, to be used as a delimiter and split() text.

I have tried the following:

delim = r'[,\n]'
delim = r'[\n,]'
delim = r',|\n'
delim = r'[,|\n]'
delim = r'(,\n)'

None of these work. The split() works fine if I make it just one or the other, such as...

delim = r','
delim = r'\n'

But not if I try and do both.

What am I missing here?

Thank you for your input.

Whole code:

    data = "abc,def\nghi"
    delim = r'[,\n]'
    values = data.split(delim)
    print(values)

Answer 1

You are using str.split() , which doesn't take a regex as an argument.

Try using re.compile on your regex string, and then using that object for the split:

import re

data = "abc,def\nghi"
delim = re.compile(r'[,\n]')
values = delim.split(data)
print(values)

Yields:

['abc', 'def', 'ghi']

Answer 2

This is bult-in python re module

import re

data = "abc,def\nghi"

re.split(",|\n", data)
Out[3]: ['abc', 'def', 'ghi']

You can enter the delimiter list as such ",|\\n|;|whatever|whatever2"