Efficiently split a string using multiple separators and retaining each separator?

Question

I need to split strings of data using each character from string.punctuation and string.whitespace as a separator.

Furthermore, I need for the

Answer 1

import re
import string

p = re.compile("[^{0}]+|[{0}]+".format(re.escape(
    string.punctuation + string.whitespace)))

print p.findall("Now is the winter of our discontent")

I'm no big fan of using regexps for all problems, but I don't think you have much choice in this if you want it fast and short.

I'll explain the regexp since you're not familiar with it:

• [...] means any of the characters inside the square brackets
• [^...] means any of the characters not inside the square brackets
• + behind means one or more of the previous thing
• x|y means to match either x or y

So the regexp matches 1 or more characters where either all must be punctuation and whitespace, or none must be. The findall method finds all non-overlapping matches of the pattern.