Question

I want to split a string by a list of indices, where the split segments begin with one index and end before the next one.

Example:

s = 'long string that I want to split up'
indices = [0,5,12,17]
parts = [s[index:] for index in indices]
for part in parts:
    print part

This will return:

long string that I want to split up
string that I want to split up
that I want to split up
I want to split up

I’m trying to get:

long
string
that
I want to split up

Answer 1

s = 'long string that I want to split up'
indices = [0,5,12,17]
parts = [s[i:j] for i,j in zip(indices, indices[1:]+[None])]

returns

['long ', 'string ', 'that ', 'I want to split up']

which you can print using:

print '\n'.join(parts)

Another possibility (without copying indices) would be:

s = 'long string that I want to split up'
indices = [0,5,12,17]
indices.append(None)
parts = [s[indices[i]:indices[i+1]] for i in xrange(len(indices)-1)]