Python regex split without empty string

Question

I have the following file names that exhibit this pattern:

000014_L_20111007T084734-20111008T023142.txt
000014_U_20111007T084734-20111008T023142.txt
...
         


        

Answer 1

Since this came up on google and for completeness, try using re.findall as an alternative!

This does require a little re-thinking, but it still returns a list of matches like split does. This makes it a nice drop-in replacement for some existing code and gets rid of the unwanted text. Pair it with lookaheads and/or lookbehinds and you get very similar behavior.

Yes, this is a bit of a "you're asking the wrong question" answer and doesn't use re.split(). It does solve the underlying issue- your list of matches suddenly have zero-length strings in it and you don't want that.