You can do that by creating a regular expression that matches either a word or one of your special characters. I don't know exactly what your rules are, but given the input and desired output, this works:
[A-Za-z']+|[*?()$.,!]
You can then use FindAllString
to return the individual strings.
See https://play.golang.org/p/se6B74G_Fv.
The idea of the regular expression is to match either a word, here defined as a sequence of one or more upper or lower case letters or apostrophes, or a "special character", defined as any of the non-word characters in your sample input. The regular expression contains two parts separated by a |
, meaning that either alternative can match. A set of characters contained within square brackets is called a character class, which means that any of the characters can match (and a-z
means all characters from a to z). Since the left alternative is a character class followed by a +
, one or more of the characters in the class will match. The portion on the right only matches one character. You may need to adjust this to behave exactly the way you want. For more information on Go regular expressions, see https://github.com/google/re2/wiki/Syntax.