Trouble splitting strings with consecutive delimiters

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 01 May 2012 04:50:48 +0000, deuteros wrote:

> I'm using regular expressions to split a string using multiple
> delimiters. But if two or more of my delimiters occur next to each other
> in the string, it puts an empty string in the resulting list.

As I would expect. After all, there *is* an empty string between two 
delimiters.


> For example:
> 
>     	re.split(':|;|px', "width:150px;height:50px;float:right")
> 
> Results in
> 
>     	['width', '150', '', 'height', '50', '', 'float', 'right']
> 
> Is there any way to avoid getting '' in my list without adding px; as a
> delimiter?

Probably. But why not do it the easy way?


items = re.split(':|;|px', "width:150px;height:50px;float:right")
items = filter(None, item)

In Python 3, the second line will need to be list(filter(None, item)).



-- 
Steven