Python regex breaks a string into one of two delimiters

Question

I wanted to cut a string of email addresses that can be separated by any combination of commas and spaces.

And I thought it would be pretty straight forward:

sep = re.compile('(\s*,*)+') print sep.split("""[e-mail], [e-mail] [e-mail],,[e-mail]""") 

But this is not so. I cannot find a regex that does not leave any empty slots like:

 ['[e-mail]', '', '[e-mail]', '', '[e-mail]', '', '[e-mail]'] 

I tried various combinations, but nobody works. Is this possible with regex?

Answer 1

Doh!

That is exactly so.

 sep = re.compile('[\s,]+') 

Answer 2

without re

 line = 'e@d , f@g, 7@g' addresses = line.split(',') addresses = [ address.strip() for address in addresses ] 

Answer 3

I like the following ...

 >>> sep= re.compile( r',*\s*' ) >>> sep.split("""[e-mail], [e-mail] [e-mail],,[e-mail]""") ['[e-mail]', '[e-mail]', '[e-mail]', '[e-mail]'] 

Which also seems to work with your test data.