Splitting a string

[Peter Otten]

Thomas Heller wrote:

> Thanks to all for these code snippets.  Peter's solution is the winner -
> most elegant and also the fastest.  With an additional list comprehension
> to remove the possible empty strings at the start and at the end I get
> 16 us.  Interesting is that Xavier's solution (which is similar to
> some code that I wrote myself) isn't so much slower; it get timings of
> around 22 us.

Deleting the first or last item is probably faster than looping over the 
whole list. If there aren't any empty strings the overhead is constant.

_split = re.compile(r"(\d+)").split
def split(s):
    if not s:
        return ()
    parts = _split(s)
    parts[1::2] = map(int, parts[1::2])
    if parts[-1] == "":
        del parts[-1]
    if parts[0] == "":
        del parts[0]
    return tuple(parts)

Peter