> My template outside of the '%s' characters contains only commas and
> spaces, and within, neither commas nor spaces. Given that information,
> is there any reason it might not work properly?
Given this new (key) information along with the assumption that
you're doing straight string replacement (not dictionary
replacement of the form "%(key)s" or other non-string types such
as "%05.2f"), then yes, a reversal is possible. To make it more
explicit, one would do something like
>>> template = '%s, %s, %s'
>>> values = ('Tom', 'Dick', 'Harry')
>>> formatted = template % values
>>> import re
>>> unformat_string = template.replace('%s', '([^, ]+)')
>>> unformatter = re.compile(unformat_string)
>>> extracted_values = unformatter.search(formatted).groups()
using '[^, ]+' to mean "one or more characters that aren't a
comma or a space".
-tkc
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