Question

I have strings like “5d4h2s”, where I want to get 5, 4, and 2 from that string, but I also want to know that 5 was paired with d, and that 4 was paired with h, etc etc. Is there an easy way of doing this without parsing char by char?

Answer 1

If your input does not get more complicated than 5d4h2s:

>>> import re
>>> s = "5d4h2s"
>>> p = re.compile("([0-9])([a-z])")
>>> for m in p.findall(s):
...   print m
... 
('5', 'd')
('4', 'h')
('2', 's')

And if it gets, you can easily adjust the regular expression, e.g.

>>> p = re.compile("([0-9]*)([a-z])")

to accept input like:

>>> s = "5d14h2s"

Finally, you can condense the regex to:

>>> p = re.compile("([\d]+)([dhms])")