Python Regex Compile Split string so that words appear first

Question

Say I was given a string like so

text = "1234 I just ? shut * the door"

I want to use a regex with re.compile() such that when I split the list all of the words are in front.

I.e. it should look like this.

text = ["I", "just", "shut", "the", "door", "1234", "?", "*"]

How can I use re.compile() to split the string this way?

import re
r = re.compile('regex to split string so that words are first').split(text)

Please let me know if you need any more information.

Thank you for the help.

Answer 1

IIUC, you don't need re. Just use str.split with sorted:

sorted(text.split(), key=lambda x: not x.isalpha())

Output:

['I', 'just', 'shut', 'the', 'door', '1234', '?', '*']