I'm trying to perform a string split on a set of somewhat irregular data that looks something like:

\n\tName: John Smith
\n\t  Home: Anytown USA
\n\t    Phone: 555-555-555
\n\t  Other Home: Somewhere Else
\n\t Notes: Other data
\n\tName: Jane Smith
\n\t  Misc: Data with spaces

I'd like to convert this into a tuple/dict where I later will split on the colon :, but first I need to get rid of all the extra whitespace. I'm guessing a regex is the best way but I can't seem to get one that works, below is my attempt.

data_string.split('\n\t *')

Just use .strip(), it removes all whitespace for you, including tabs and newlines, while splitting. The splitting itself can then be done with data_string.splitlines():

[s.strip() for s in data_string.splitlines()]

Output:

>>> [s.strip() for s in data_string.splitlines()]
['Name: John Smith', 'Home: Anytown USA', 'Phone: 555-555-555', 'Other Home: Somewhere Else', 'Notes: Other data', 'Name: Jane Smith', 'Misc: Data with spaces']

You can even inline the splitting on : as well now:

>>> [s.strip().split(': ') for s in data_string.splitlines()]
[['Name', 'John Smith'], ['Home', 'Anytown USA'], ['Phone', '555-555-555'], ['Other Home', 'Somewhere Else'], ['Notes', 'Other data'], ['Name', 'Jane Smith'], ['Misc', 'Data with spaces']]