how best to split into singleton and sequence

[bonono at gmail.com]

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]

Randy Bush wrote:
> >>> 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):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> ValueError: too many values to unpack
> >>>
>
> 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