Split a string at uppercase letters

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What is the pythonic way to split a string before the occurrences of a given set of characters?

For example, I want to split 'TheLongAndWindingRoad' at any occurrence of an uppercase letter (possibly except the first), and obtain ['The', 'Long', 'And', 'Winding', 'Road'].

Edit: It should also split single occurrences, i.e. from 'ABC' I'd like to obtain ['A', 'B', 'C'].

19 Answers

Unfortunately it's not possible to split on a zero-width match in Python. But you can use re.findall instead:

>>> import re
>>> re.findall('[A-Z][^A-Z]*', 'TheLongAndWindingRoad')
['The', 'Long', 'And', 'Winding', 'Road']
>>> re.findall('[A-Z][^A-Z]*', 'ABC')
['A', 'B', 'C']

Here is an alternative regex solution. The problem can be reprased as "how do I insert a space before each uppercase letter, before doing the split":

>>> s = "TheLongAndWindingRoad ABC A123B45"
>>> re.sub( r"([A-Z])", r" \1", s).split()
['The', 'Long', 'And', 'Winding', 'Road', 'A', 'B', 'C', 'A123', 'B45']

This has the advantage of preserving all non-whitespace characters, which most other solutions do not.

Use a lookahead:

In Python 3.7, you can do this:

re.split('(?=[A-Z])', 'theLongAndWindingRoad')

And it yields:

['the', 'Long', 'And', 'Winding', 'Road']
>>> import re
>>> re.findall('[A-Z][a-z]*', 'TheLongAndWindingRoad')
['The', 'Long', 'And', 'Winding', 'Road']

>>> re.findall('[A-Z][a-z]*', 'SplitAString')
['Split', 'A', 'String']

>>> re.findall('[A-Z][a-z]*', 'ABC')
['A', 'B', 'C']

If you want "It'sATest" to split to ["It's", 'A', 'Test'] change the rexeg to "[A-Z][a-z']*"

A variation on @ChristopheD 's solution

s = 'TheLongAndWindingRoad'

pos = [i for i,e in enumerate(s+'A') if e.isupper()]
parts = [s[pos[j]:pos[j+1]] for j in xrange(len(pos)-1)]

print parts

I think that a better answer might be to split the string up into words that do not end in a capital. This would handle the case where the string doesn't start with a capital letter.

 re.findall('.[^A-Z]*', 'aboutTheLongAndWindingRoad')

example:

>>> import re
>>> re.findall('.[^A-Z]*', 'aboutTheLongAndWindingRoadABC')
['about', 'The', 'Long', 'And', 'Winding', 'Road', 'A', 'B', 'C']
import re
filter(None, re.split("([A-Z][^A-Z]*)", "TheLongAndWindingRoad"))

or

[s for s in re.split("([A-Z][^A-Z]*)", "TheLongAndWindingRoad") if s]

Pythonic way could be:

"".join([(" "+i if i.isupper() else i) for i in 'TheLongAndWindingRoad']).strip().split()
['The', 'Long', 'And', 'Winding', 'Road']

Works good for Unicode, avoiding re/re2.

"".join([(" "+i if i.isupper() else i) for i in 'СуперМаркетыПродажаКлиент']).strip().split()
['Супер', 'Маркеты', 'Продажа', 'Клиент']

Alternative solution (if you dislike explicit regexes):

s = 'TheLongAndWindingRoad'

pos = [i for i,e in enumerate(s) if e.isupper()]

parts = []
for j in xrange(len(pos)):
    try:
        parts.append(s[pos[j]:pos[j+1]])
    except IndexError:
        parts.append(s[pos[j]:])

print parts

Replace every uppercase letter 'L' in the given with an empty space plus that letter " L". We can do this using list comprehension or we can define a function to do it as follows.

s = 'TheLongANDWindingRoad ABC A123B45'
''.join([char if (char.islower() or not char.isalpha()) else ' '+char for char in list(s)]).strip().split()
>>> ['The', 'Long', 'A', 'N', 'D', 'Winding', 'Road', 'A', 'B', 'C', 'A123', 'B45']

If you choose to go by a function, here is how.

def splitAtUpperCase(text):
    result = ""
    for char in text:
        if char.isupper():
            result += " " + char
        else:
            result += char
    return result.split()

In the case of the given example:

print(splitAtUpperCase('TheLongAndWindingRoad')) 
>>>['The', 'Long', 'A', 'N', 'D', 'Winding', 'Road']

But most of the time that we are splitting a sentence at upper case letters, it is usually the case that we want to maintain abbreviations that are typically a continuous stream of uppercase letters. The code below would help.

def splitAtUpperCase(s):
    for i in range(len(s)-1)[::-1]:
        if s[i].isupper() and s[i+1].islower():
            s = s[:i]+' '+s[i:]
        if s[i].isupper() and s[i-1].islower():
            s = s[:i]+' '+s[i:]
    return s.split()

splitAtUpperCase('TheLongANDWindingRoad')

>>> ['The', 'Long', 'AND', 'Winding', 'Road']

Thanks.

Sharing what came to mind when I read the post. Different from other posts.

strs = 'TheLongAndWindingRoad'

# grab index of uppercase letters in strs
start_idx = [i for i,j in enumerate(strs) if j.isupper()]

# create empty list
strs_list = []

# initiate counter
cnt = 1

for pos in start_idx:
    start_pos = pos

    # use counter to grab next positional element and overlook IndexeError
    try:
        end_pos = start_idx[cnt]
    except IndexError:
        continue

    # append to empty list
    strs_list.append(strs[start_pos:end_pos])

    cnt += 1

You might also wanna do it this way

def camelcase(s):
    
    words = []
    
    for char in s:
        if char.isupper():
            words.append(':'+char)
        else:
            words.append(char)
    words = ((''.join(words)).split(':'))
    
    return len(words)

This will output as follows

s = 'oneTwoThree'
print(camecase(s)
//['one', 'Two', 'Three']
def solution(s):
   
    st = ''
    for c in s:
        if c == c.upper():
            st += ' '   
        st += c    
       
    return st

I'm using list

def split_by_upper(x): 
i = 0       
lis = list(x)
while True:
    if i == len(lis)-1:
        if lis[i].isupper():
            lis.insert(i,",")
        break
    if lis[i].isupper() and i != 0:
        lis.insert(i,",")
        i+=1
    i+=1
return "".join(lis).split(",")

OUTPUT:

data = "TheLongAndWindingRoad"
print(split_by_upper(data))`
>> ['The', 'Long', 'And', 'Winding', 'Road']
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