identifying if the character is a digit or Unicode character within a word in python

python, regex, tamil, unicode-string

Solution

You can use `(.*?)(\d+)(.*)` regular expression, that will save 3 groups: everything before digits, digits and everything after:

>>> import re
>>> pattern = ur'(.*?)(\d+)(.*)'
>>> s = u"ரூ.100"
>>> match = re.match(pattern, s, re.UNICODE)
>>> print match.group(1)
ரூ.
>>> print match.group(2)
100

Or, you can unpack matched groups into variables, like this:

>>> s = u"100ஆம்"
>>> match = re.match(pattern, s, re.UNICODE)
>>> before, digits, after = match.groups()
>>> print before

>>> print digits
100
>>> print after
ஆம்

Hope that helps.

Problem

I want to find if a word contains digit and characters and if so separate the digit part and the character part. I want to check for tamil words, ex: `ரூ.100` or `ரூ100`. I want to seperate the `ரூ.` and `100`, and `ரூ` and `100`. How do i do it in python. I tried like this: ``` for word in f.read().strip().split(): for word1, word2, word3 in zip(word,word[1:],word[2:]): if word1 == "ர" and word2 == "ூ " and word3.isdigit(): print word1 print word2 if word1.decode('utf-8') == unichr(0xbb0) and word2.decode('utf-8') == unichr(0xbc2): print word1 print word2 ```

Original source