Question

If i have a list of prefix that can be attached to a string, how do i split a string such into it’s prefix and the other characters in the next substring. For example:

prefixes = ['over','under','re','un','co']

str1 = "overachieve"
output: ["over","achieve"]

str2 = "reundo"
output = ["re","un","do"]

Is there a better way to do the above task, maybe with regex or some string functions other than:

str1 = "reundo"
output = []

for x in [p for p in prefixes if p in str1]:
    output.append(x)    
    str1 =  str1.replace(x,"",1)
output.append(str1)

Answer 1

Regular expressions are an efficient way to search for many alternative prefixes:

import re

def split_prefixes(word, prefixes):
    regex = re.compile('|'.join(sorted(prefixes, key=len, reverse=True)))
    result = []
    i = 0
    while True:
        mo = regex.match(word, i)
        if mo is None:
            result.append(word[i:])
            return result
        result.append(mo.group())
        i = mo.end()


>>> prefixes = ['over', 'under', 're', 'un', 'co']
>>> for word in ['overachieve', 'reundo', 'empire', 'coprocessor']:
        print word, '-->', split_prefixes(word, prefixes)

overachieve --> ['over', 'achieve']
reundo --> ['re', 'un', 'do']
empire --> ['empire']
coprocessor --> ['co', 'processor']