a splitting headache

[Thomas]

On Oct 15, 9:18 pm, Mensanator <mensana... at aol.com> wrote:
> All I wanted to do is split a binary number into two lists,
> a list of blocks of consecutive ones and another list of
> blocks of consecutive zeroes.
>
> But no, you can't do that.
>
> >>> c = '0010000110'
> >>> c.split('0')
>
> ['', '', '1', '', '', '', '11', '']
>
> Ok, the consecutive delimiters appear as empty strings for
> reasons unknown (except for the first one). Except when they
> start or end the string in which case the first one is included.
>
> Maybe there's a reason for this inconsistent behaviour but you
> won't find it in the documentation.
>
> And the re module doesn't help.
>
> >>> f = '  1 2  3   4    '
> >>> re.split(' ',f)
>
> ['', '', '1', '2', '', '3', '', '', '4', '', '', '', '']
>
> OTOH, if my digits were seperated by whitespace, I could use
> str.split(), which behaves differently (but not re.split()
> because it requires a string argument).
>
> >>> ' 1  11   111 11    '.split()
>
> ['1', '11', '111', '11']
>
> That means I can use re to solve my problem after all.
>
> >>> c = '0010000110'
> >>> re.sub('0',' ',c).split()
> ['1', '11']
> >>> re.sub('1',' ',c).split()
>
> ['00', '0000', '0']
>
> Would it have been that difficult to show in the documentation
> how to do this?


PythonWin 2.5.4 (r254:67916, Dec 23 2008, 15:10:54) [MSC v.1310 32 bit
(Intel)] on win32.
Portions Copyright 1994-2008 Mark Hammond - see 'Help/About PythonWin'
for further copyright information.
>>> list('001010111100101')
['0', '0', '1', '0', '1', '0', '1', '1', '1', '1', '0', '0', '1', '0',
'1']
>>>

TC