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.

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Answer 1

If you want a reversible operation (preserve the delimiters), you can use this function:

def tokenizeSentence_Reversible(sentence):
    setOfDelimiters = ['.', ' ', ',', '*', ';', '!']
    listOfTokens = [sentence]

    for delimiter in setOfDelimiters:
        newListOfTokens = []
        for ind, token in enumerate(listOfTokens):
            ll = [([delimiter, w] if ind > 0 else [w]) for ind, w in enumerate(token.split(delimiter))]
            listOfTokens = [item for sublist in ll for item in sublist] # flattens.
            listOfTokens = filter(None, listOfTokens) # Removes empty tokens: ''
            newListOfTokens.extend(listOfTokens)

        listOfTokens = newListOfTokens

    return listOfTokens