How Can I Split a String into Words Using Multiple Delimiters in Python?

Splitting Strings into Words with Multiple Word Boundary Delimiters

In Python, when splitting a string into words using str.split(), you can only specify one delimiter. This can be problematic if you want to consider punctuation as well as whitespace as word boundaries.

Solution: Using re.split()

To address this issue, consider using the re.split() function instead. re.split() allows you to specify a pattern as an argument, which can include multiple word boundary delimiters.

The pattern can be constructed using the following syntax:

\W+                  # Match any sequence of non-word characters
|                    # Or
\s+                  # Match any sequence of whitespace characters

To split the given example string into words, including punctuation, you can use the following code:

>>> import re
>>> re.split(r"\W+|\s+", "Hey, you - what are you doing here!?")
['hey', 'you', 'what', 'are', 'you', 'doing', 'here']

The above regular expression matches any sequence of non-word characters or whitespace characters, thus effectively splitting the string into words.

This method provides a flexible and customizable way to split strings based on various delimiters, ensuring that all relevant words are captured.

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