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

For any arbitrary collection of separators:

def separate(myStr, seps):
    answer = []
    temp = []
    for char in myStr:
        if char in seps:
            answer.append(''.join(temp))
            answer.append(char)
            temp = []
        else:
            temp.append(char)
    answer.append(''.join(temp))
    return answer

In [4]: print separate("Now is the winter of our discontent", set(' '))
['Now', ' ', 'is', ' ', 'the', ' ', 'winter', ' ', 'of', ' ', 'our', ' ', 'discontent']

In [5]: print separate("Now, really - it is the winter of our discontent", set(' ,-'))
['Now', ',', '', ' ', 'really', ' ', '', '-', '', ' ', 'it', ' ', 'is', ' ', 'the', ' ', 'winter', ' ', 'of', ' ', 'our', ' ', 'discontent']

Hope this helps