I have a string in Python that I want to separate into a list without any separators.
The string is similar to a byte array: '0100100010011'
I want to separate the 1's and 0's from each other without using string.split() because that function requires a separator.
This should be my expected output: ['0', '1', '00', '1', '000', '1', '00', '11']
itertools.groupby is a quick way to do this. Without a key argument it will group by the value of the items in an iterable (like a string). Then you can just join the groups:
from itertools import groupby
s = '0100100010011'
[''.join(g) for k, g in groupby(s)]
# ['0', '1', '00', '1', '000', '1', '00', '11']
One small advantage of itertools when dealing with a lot of data is that it allows you to iterate over a large set of things with needing to save the entire set to memory. So for example, you could process these one at a time without allocating the entire list:
for k, g in groupby(s):
group = ''.join(g)
# deal with a single group and forget it
Regular expressions are an even easier way to do this.
Python 3.8.5 (default, May 27 2021, 13:30:53)
[GCC 9.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> x = '0010110111000111'
>>> import re
>>> ex = r"(0+|1+)"
>>> z = re.findall(ex,x)
>>> z
['00', '1', '0', '11', '0', '111', '000', '111']
>>>
