The split() method of a RegexObject splits a string apart wherever the RE matches, returning a list of the pieces. It's similar to string.split(), providing much more generality in the delimiters that you can split by; string.split() only supports splitting by whitespace, or by a fixed string. As you'd expect, there's a module-level re.split() function, too.
You can limit the number of splits made, by passing a value for maxsplit. When maxsplit is nonzero, at most maxsplit splits will be made, and the remainder of the string is returned as the final element of the list. In the following example, the delimiter will be any sequence of non-alphanumeric characters.
>>> p = re.compile(r'\W+') >>> p.split('This is a test, short and sweet, of split().') ['This', 'is', 'a', 'test', 'short', 'and', 'sweet', 'of', 'split', ''] >>> p.split('This is a test, short and sweet, of split().', 3) ['This', 'is', 'a', 'test, short and sweet, of split().']
>>> p = re.compile(r'\W+') >>> p2 = re.compile(r'(\W+)') >>> p.split('This... is a test.') ['This', 'is', 'a', 'test', ''] >>> p2.split('This... is a test.') ['This', '... ', 'is', ' ', 'a', ' ', 'test', '.', '']
>>> re.split('[\W]+', 'Words, words, words.') ['Words', 'words', 'words', ''] >>> re.split('([\W]+)', 'Words, words, words.') ['Words', ', ', 'words', ', ', 'words', '.', ''] >>> re.split('[\W]+', 'Words, words, words.', 1) ['Words', 'words, words.']