import re r = re.compile(r'\d+|\D+') ss = [ 'It was amazing in 2016', '2016 was amazing'] for s in ss: print(r.findall(s)) print([x.strip() for x in r.findall(s)])
Standard input is empty
['It was amazing in ', '2016'] ['It was amazing in', '2016'] ['2016', ' was amazing'] ['2016', 'was amazing']