Context-sensitive delimiter

[Gribouillis]

An alternative to using re.sub() is re.finditer(). This introduces an explicit loop instead of a callback function but the advantage is that the our_split() function becomes a generator which is cleaner.

import re

def our_split(data):
    depth = 0
    pos = -1

    for match in re.finditer(r'[\[\],]', data):
        match match.group(0):
            case ',':
                if depth == 0:
                    yield data[pos + 1 : (pos := match.start())]
            case '[':
                depth += 1
            case ']':
                depth -= 1

    yield data[pos + 1:]

if __name__ == '__main__':
    data = "Richtung route, trend, way [route, direction], tendency [political etc.], course [direction], direction [course, route]"

    result = list(our_split(data))
    print(result)