Extract the numeric and alphabetic part from an alphanumeric string

[Kushal Kumaran]

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 8:47 PM, Sandhya
Prabhakaran<sandhyaprabhakaran at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a string as str='123ACTGAAC'.
>
> I need to extract the numeric part from the alphabetic part which I
> did using
>>>>numer=re.findall(r'\d+',str)
>>>>numer
> 123
>

The docs for re.findall say that it returns a list of matches.  So
'123' will be numer[0].

> To get the alphabetic part, I could do
>>>>alpha=str.replace('123','')
>>>>alpha
> ACTGAAC
> But when I give
>>>>alpha=str.replace(numer,'')
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> TypeError: expected a character buffer object
>

That's what would happen if you pass in a list instead of a string to replace.

> How do I blank out the initial numeric part so as to get just the
> alphabetic part. The string is always in the same format.
>
> Please help.
>

-- 
kushal