How do I split a string on different delimiters, but keeping on the output some of said delimiters? (Tokenize a string)

More specifically I want to split a string on any non alpha-numeric character but in the case that the delimiter is not a white space I want to keept it. That is, to the input:

my_string = 'Hey, I\'m 9/11 7-11'

I want to get:

['Hey' , ',' , 'I' , "'" , 'm', '9' , '/' , '11', '7' , '-' , '11']

Without no whitespace as a list element.

I have tried the following:

re.split('([/\'\-_,.;])|\s', my_string)

But outputs:

['Hey', ',', '', None, 'I', "'", 'm', None, '9', '/', '11', None, '7', '-', '11']

How do I solve this without 'unnecessary' iterations?

Also I have some trouble with escaping the backslash character, since '\\\\' does not seem to be working, any ideas on how to also solve this?

Thanks a lot.

Solution

You may use

import re
my_string = "Hey, I'm 9/11 7-11"
print(re.findall(r'\w+|[^\w\s]', my_string))
# => ['Hey', ',', 'I', "'", 'm', '9', '/', '11', '7', '-', '11']

See the Python demo

The \w+|[^\w\s] regex matches either 1+ word chars (letters, digits, _ symbols) or a single character other than a word and whitespace char.

BTW, to match a backslash with a regex, you need to use \\ in a raw string literal (r'\\') or 4 backslashes in a regular one ('\\\\'). It is recommended to use raw string literals to define a regex pattern in Python.