how best to split into singleton and sequence

[Randy Bush]

l = []Traceback (most recent call last):

so, i imagine what is happening is the lhs, t,l, is really
(t, (l)), i.e. only two items.

so how should i have done this readably and simply?

randy

 

[George Sakkis]

l = []
s = 'a|b'
t, l = s.split('|')
t 'a'
l 'b'
s = 'a|b|c|d'
t, l = s.split('|')

Traceback (most recent call last):

so, i imagine what is happening is the lhs, t,l, is really
(t, (l)), i.e. only two items.

so how should i have done this readably and simply?

By the way, don't use 'l' as an identifier; it is very close to '1' visually.

George

 

[Erik Max Francis]

so, i imagine what is happening is the lhs, t,l, is really
(t, (l)), i.e. only two items.

so how should i have done this readably and simply?

Your question isn't at all clear. You're trying to assign a 4-element
tuple to two elements. That generates a ValueError.

Did you want to only split once at most? Then it's s.split('|', 1).
Did you want to assign the first element to the first variable and the
rest to the next? Then it's x = s.split('|'); a, b = x[0], x[1:].

 

[bonono]

what you wrote is the most readable to me:

just asign the first 2 element to t, l respectively and forget about
the rest. I assume that is what you want. I think perl may do it this
way.

A solution which I think looks uglier is :

t, l = s.split('|')[:2]

l = []
s = 'a|b'
t, l = s.split('|')
t 'a'
l 'b'
s = 'a|b|c|d'
t, l = s.split('|')

Traceback (most recent call last):

so, i imagine what is happening is the lhs, t,l, is really
(t, (l)), i.e. only two items.

so how should i have done this readably and simply?

randy