Separate number from arbitrary position in string

Question

I wouldn't usually ask something like this, but finding decent information seems to be slow going. I'm curious what the best approach to separating numerical values from a string would be. It shouldn't matter where in the string the numbers are found, or whether they are int or float values. The string will have unknown amounts of spaces, but the numbers will always follow a space. There could be more than one set of numbers contained within the string. I want to keep the text and the numbers as separate items in a list.

I'm hoping for a way to avoid regex as much as possible, though, I'm not sure if there is even another alternative. I would prefer to figure it out on my own with a little direction or advice but, if it's regex, I might need it to be a bit more specific, as my understanding is rudimentary at best.

Answer 1 · 2017-05-06T02:14:47Z

May 6, 2017 2:14am

Unless someone else has written this function in the Python library, which to my knowledge there's none, the regular expression is the only answer to this kind of problem.

You may use the re.findall function to do that. Here's a short example.

s = "today's temp is 32C, the current time is 15:22."

s is example string. And to filter out all the integer from it, you can do the following

import re
re.findall("\d+", s)    # => ['32', '15', '22']

Now, it's pretty simple to just filter out all the integer, but you want it to work with both int & float, then you have to figure out how to expand the regex to include matching of the floating point number; additionally, you also need to consider the +/- sign that might come before the number.

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Mike Wagner

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Separate number from arbitrary position in string

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William Li

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