regex re.findall

Question

I have a string like this:

string = ' "K" -4+2-2+1+ "W" +4-1-6-8-6-4+5+ "Q" ' 

and I want to create a list with re.findall like this:

['"K"', "-4+2-2+1+", '"W"', "+4-1-6-8-6-4+5+", '"Q"']

can anyone help me on this?

Answer 1

You don't need regexes, you need string.split()

Answer 2

You can use string.split() to split around spaces in your string. Since your particular string also has trailing whitespace, I'd recommend also using string.strip() .

mystring = ' "K" -4+2-2+1+ "W" +4-1-6-8-6-4+5+ "Q" '
mylist = mystring.strip().split(" ")

mylist will have the format you need:

['"K"', '-4+2-2+1+', '"W"', '+4-1-6-8-6-4+5+', '"Q"']

If you REALLY need to do this with a Regular expression, I guess you could use an expression like this:

import re

myregex = r"(\"\w\") ([-+0-9]+) (\"\w\") ([-+0-9]+) (\"\w\")"
mystring = ' "K" -4+2-2+1+ "W" +4-1-6-8-6-4+5+ "Q" '

mylist = re.findall(myregex,mystring)

Both will result in the same list, but using strip and split will probably have better performance.