Split Strings into words with multiple word boundary delimiters

Question

I think what I want to do is a fairly common task but I\'ve found no reference on the web. I have text with punctuation, and I want a list of the words.

\"H         


        

Answer 1

def get_words(s):
    l = []
    w = ''
    for c in s.lower():
        if c in '-!?,. ':
            if w != '': 
                l.append(w)
            w = ''
        else:
            w = w + c
    if w != '': 
        l.append(w)
    return l

Here is the usage:

>>> s = "Hey, you - what are you doing here!?"
>>> print get_words(s)
['hey', 'you', 'what', 'are', 'you', 'doing', 'here']