Question

I have a hierarchical descriptor string that looks like foo:bar:baz where elements in the hierarchy are delimited by :, and I would like to iterate through the hierarchy levels. Is there an easy way to do this, something easier than this:

def hierarchy(s):
  segments = s.split(':')
  for i in range(len(segments)):
    prefix = ':'.join(segments[0:i+1])
    print prefix  
    # or do something else instead of prefix

Answer 1

How about:

In [9]: [s[:m.start()] for m in re.finditer(':|$', s)]
Out[9]: ['foo', 'foo:bar', 'foo:bar:baz']