244 – Flexible string splitting

The function re.split lets you split a string on occurrences of a pattern, as you saw in the previous tip.

Groups that are parenthesised in the splitting pattern are included in the resulting list:

import re

text = "Hey there, buddy!"
print(re.split(r"\W+", text))
# ['Hey', 'there', 'buddy', '']
print(re.split(r"(\W+)", text))
# ['Hey', ' ', 'there', ', ', 'buddy', '!', '']

Just like with the string method split, you can specify a maximum number of splits with the parameter maxsplit:

print(re.split(r"\W+", text, maxsplit=1))
# ['Hey', 'there, buddy!']