Creating a list given an equation with no spaces

I want to create a list given a string such as ‘b123+xyz=1+z1$’ so that the list equals [‘b123’, ‘+’, ‘xyz’, ‘=’, ‘1’, ‘+’, ‘z1’, ‘$’]

Without spaces or a single repeating pattern, I do not know how to split the string into a list.

I tried creating if statements in a for loop to append the string when it reaches a character that is not a digit or letter through isdigit and isalpha but could not differentiate between variables and digits.

Answer

You can use a regular expression to split your string. This works by using positive lookaheads and look behinds for none word chars.

import re

sample = "b123+xyz=1+z1$"
split_sample = re.split("(?=W)|(?:(?<=W)(?!$))", sample)
print(split_sample)

OUTPUT

['b123', '+', 'xyz', '=', '1', '+', 'z1', '$']

REGEX EXPLAIN