python - Split by a word (case insensitive)

Question

If I want to take

"hi, my name is foo bar"

and split it on "foo", and have that split be case insensitive (split on any of "foO", "FOO", "Foo", etc), what should I do? Keep in mind that although I would like to have the split be case insensitive, I also DO want to maintain the case sensitivity of the rest of the string.

So if I have:

test = "hi, my name is foo bar"

print test.split('foo')

print test.upper().split("FOO")

I would get

['hi, my name is ', ' bar']
['HI, MY NAME IS ', ' BAR']

respectively.

But what I want is:

['hi, my name is ', ' bar']

every time. The goal is to maintain the case sensitivity of the original string, except for what I am splitting on.

So if my test string was:

"hI MY NAME iS FoO bar"

my desired result would be:

['hI MY NAME iS ', ' bar']

Answer 1

You can use the re.split function with the re.IGNORECASE flag (or re.I for short):

>>> import re
>>> test = "hI MY NAME iS FoO bar"
>>> re.split("foo", test, flags=re.IGNORECASE)
['hI MY NAME iS ', ' bar']
>>>