In article <hjklfd$ll...@foggy.unx.sas.com>,
"Tim Arnold" <tim.arn...@sas.com> wrote:
> also, partition works though it returns a tuple instead of a list.
> >>> s = 'hello world'
> >>> s.partition(' ')
> ('hello', ' ', 'world')
I've never used partition() before; my first thought on reading the above
was, "That's weird, it should be returning a list". Then I went and looked
at the docs. Given the description (returns specifically a 3-tuple), I
guess a tuple makes sense, but now I'm wondering what the use case was for
this method when it was invented?
Having a variant of split() which either leaves the delimiter on the end of
each word, or returns a list of alternating [word, delimiter, word,
delimiter, word] seems logical and orthogonal. In fact, partition() is
really just the hypothetical whitespace-preserving variant of split(), with
maxsplit=1, except that it returns a tuple instead of a list.
So, what was the original problem partition() was trying to solve?
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