converting a substring of digits and keep what follows

[Skaperen]

i have a string with digits (possibly with a period) and something else at the end such as '1234.5foobar'. i want to extract and convert the number and get a string of what remains. if it were already a function, it would probably return a 2-tuple like (number,remaining_string). the use case goal is making a function that converts expressed time intervals in various fixed units such as '1wk1day3min5' -> 691385 or '2m7s' -> 127 or '1.1h' -> 3960. i know how to do this in single character steps as i have implemented this in C, before. i need the same thing in Python, now, and wonder if there is a shorter way using only what comes with Python (so i do not need to require the user of my code to install anything but Python, itself).

[Gribouillis]

You can try the following regex

import re

pat = re.compile(r'(\d+(?:\.\d*)?|\.\d+)')

data = """
1wk1day3min5
2m7s
1.1h
1.1.2
""".strip().split('\n')

for s in data:
    res = pat.split(s)
    print(res)

Output:
['', '1', 'wk', '1', 'day', '3', 'min', '5', '']
['', '2', 'm', '7', 's']
['', '1.1', 'h']
['', '1.1', '', '.2', '']

In the resulting list, every odd index contains a number, every even index contains a possibly empty string between numbers.

[ljmetzger]

There is a great online regex tester https://regex101.com/#python courtesy of DeaD_EyE which even generates Python code.

Lewis

[Skaperen]

There is a great online regex tester https://regex101.com/#python courtesy of DeaD_EyE which even generates Python code.

Lewis

copy and paste does not work on that page ... at least pasting the RE does not work. typing works, but i'm not very accurate at typing REs other people wrote. at least the forum post edit form lets me paste in ... (\d+(?:\.\d*)?|\.\d+)

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it look like that regex should work for me. i can just pop off the first element from the list an loop through the rest popping them as i go, 2 at a time, a number and a multiplier suffix {'day':86400,...}.

maybe the next thing to ask for is a literal arithmetic expression evaluator (have done that in C, too). then somehow combine them so i can do things like '(1week3days)/5' and get 172800.

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or maybe a general purpose units suffix thing.