Question

How do I find all the strings between a regex pattern?
For example,

>>> s="123 asd 12 456 sfd g 789"
>>> reg=re.compile("\d{3}")
>>> reg.findall(s)
['123', '456', '789']

I want to find:

[' asd 12 ', ' sfd g ']

Answer 1

Use the .split() method instead of .findall():

>>> reg.split(s)
['', ' asd 12 ', ' sfd g ', '']

It includes all results in between the matches, including the empty strings at the start and end. You can filter those out:

>>> filter(None, reg.split(s))
[' asd 12 ', ' sfd g ']

although on Python 3 you’d need to use list(filter(None, reg.split(s))), or iterate over the result of filter().