Why does this regex result in four items?

Question

I want to split a string by , ->, =>, or those wrapped with several spaces, meaning that I can get two items, she and <

Answer 1

If you can just strip your input string. From your description, all you need is to split the words on either \s+ or \s*->\s* or \s*=>\s*

So here is my solution:

p = re.compile(r'\s*[-=]>\s*|\s+')
input1 = "she he"
input2 = " she  -> he \n".strip()

print p.split(input1)
print p.split(input2)

Your output would be just 'she' and 'he':

['she', 'he']