Question

How can I split by word boundary in a regex engine that doesn’t support it?

python’s re can match on \b but doesn’t seem to support splitting on it. I seem to recall dealing with other regex engines that had the same limitation.

example input:

'hello, foo' 

expected output:

['hello', ', ', 'foo'] 

actual python output:

>>> re.compile(r'\b').split('hello, foo') ['hello, foo'] 

Answer 1

(\W+) can give you the expected output:

>>> re.compile(r'(\W+)').split('hello, foo') ['hello', ', ', 'foo']