Regular expression for simple math expressions

Question

As an exercise I was trying to come up with a regex to evaluate simple algebra like

q = \'23 * 345 - 123+65\'

From here I want to get \'23\', \

Answer 1

Your regex is confusing. Better to use re.split() for this purpose:

q = '23 * 345 - 123+65'
print re.split('\s*([-+/*])\s*', q)

Outputs:

['23', '*', '345', '-', '123', '+', '65']