Question

I am looking to be able to split a string into a list around anything that is not a numeral or a dot. Currently the split method only provides a way of doing a positive match for split, is a regex the best route to take in this situation?

For example, given the string "10.23, 10.13.21; 10.1 10.5 and 10.23.32"
This should return the list ['10.23', '10.13.21', '10.1', '10.5', '10.23.32']

As such I believe the best regex to use in this situation would be…
[\d\.]+

Is this the best way to handle such a case?

Answer 1

In case you are thinking of re.findall: you can use re.split with an inverted version of your regex:

In [1]: import re

In [2]: s = "10.23, 10.13.21; 10.1 10.5 and 10.23.32"

In [3]: re.split(r'[^\d\.]+', s)
Out[3]: ['10.23', '10.13.21', '10.1', '10.5', '10.23.32']