Carl M. Johnson wrote:
Anyway, you'll get no argument from me: Regexes are easy once you know regexes. For whatever reason though, I've never been able to successfully, permanently learn regexes. I'm just trying to make the case that it's tough for some users to have to learn a whole separate language in order to do a certain kind of string split more simply.
I would say, *easy* regexes are easy once you know regexes. But in general, not so much... even Larry Wall is rethinking a lot of regex culture and syntax: http://dev.perl.org/perl6/doc/design/apo/A05.html But this case is relatively easy, although there is at least one obvious trap for the unwary: forgetting to escape the split chars.
Then again that's not to say that there needs to be such functionality. After all, love them or hate them, there are a lot of tasks for which regexes are just the simplest way to get the job done. It's just that users like me (if there are any) who find regexes hard to get to stick would appreciate being able to avoid learning them for a little longer.
I can sympathise with that. Regexes are essentially another programming language (albeit not Turing Complete), and everything we love about Python, regexes are the opposite. They're as far from executable pseudo-code as it's possible to get without becoming one of those esoteric languages that have three commands and one data type... *wink* Anyway, for what it's worth, when I think about the times I've needed something like a multi-split, it has been for mini-parsers. I think a cross between split and partition would be more useful: multisplit(source, seps, maxsplit=None) => [(substring, sep), ...] Here's a pure-Python implementation, limited to single character separators: def multisplit(source, seps, maxsplit=None): def find_first(): for i, c in enumerate(source): if c in seps: return i return -1 count = 0 while True: if maxsplit is not None and count >= maxsplit: yield (source, '') break p = find_first() if p >= 0: yield (source[:p], source[p]) count += 1 source = source[p+1:] else: yield (source, '') break -- Steven