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I am trying to split my string into a list, separating by whitespace and characters but leaving numbers together.
For example, the string: 

"1 2 +="

would end up as: 

["1", " ", "2", " " ,"+", "="]

The code I currently have is 

temp = re.findall('\d+|\S', input)

This seperates the string as intended but does also remove the whitespace, how do I stop this?

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perhaps you need \s? –  rogaos Nov 18 '13 at 22:00
 
Are you writing a postfix parser? –  sudo_O Nov 18 '13 at 22:05
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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

You can use \D to find anything that is not a digit:

\d+|\D

Python:

temp = re.findall(r'\d+|\D', input) 
//Output: ['1', ' ', '2', ' ', '+', '=']

It would also work if you just used . since it'll match the \d+ first anyway. But its probably cleaner not to.

\d+|.
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up vote 3 down vote

Just add \s or \s+ to your current regular expression (use \s+ if you want consecutive whitespace characters to be grouped together). For example:

>>> s = "1 2 +="
>>> re.findall(r'\d+|\S|\s+', s)
['1', ' ', '2', ' ', '+', '=']

If you don't want consecutive whitespace to be grouped together, then instead of r'\d+|\S|\s' it would probably make more sense to use r'\d+|\D'.

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