Split string while retaining whitespace separators

Question

I am trying to split a string, but keep all separators bundled together in a separate list.

s = "This is a test     for \n a string"

should results in

a = ["This", "is", "a", "test", "for", "a", "string"]
b = [" ", " ", " ", "     ", " \n ", " "]

Any idea on how to handle that?

Answer 1

re.split is your friend:

split = re.split(r'(\s+)', s)   
x = split[::2]
y = split[1::2]

>>> x
['This', 'is', 'a', 'test', 'for', 'a', 'string']
>>> y
[' ', ' ', ' ', '     ', ' \n ', ' ']