String Splitter Brain Teaser

[Steven Bethard]

Michael Spencer wrote:
> def xgen(s):
>     srciter = iter(s)
>     item = [srciter.next()]
>     for i in srciter:
>         if i == '/':
>             item.append(srciter.next())
>         else:
>             yield item
>             item = [i]
>     yield item

Note that the generator-based solution doesn't generate an error on some 
invalid data (e.g. where there is a final '/'), where the previous 
list-based solution did:

py> group("AGC/C/TGA/T")
[['A'], ['G'], ['C', 'C', 'T'], ['G'], ['A', 'T']]
py> group("AGC/C/TGA/T/")
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ?
   File "<interactive input>", line 6, in group
StopIteration
py> list(xgen("AGC/C/TGA/T"))
[['A'], ['G'], ['C', 'C', 'T'], ['G'], ['A', 'T']]
py> list(xgen("AGC/C/TGA/T/"))
[['A'], ['G'], ['C', 'C', 'T'], ['G']]

Not sure which is the desired behavior, but I figured the OP should be 
aware of this in case it's possible to have strings in an invalid 
format.  If this needs to be fixed, you can just wrap the srciter.next() 
call in an appropriate try/except.

STeVe