new string method in 2.5 (partition)

[richard.charts at gmail.com]

I'm confused.
What's the difference between this and string.split?

John Salerno wrote:
> Forgive my excitement, especially if you are already aware of this, but
> this seems like the kind of feature that is easily overlooked (yet could
> be very useful):
>
>
> Both 8-bit and Unicode strings have new partition(sep) and
> rpartition(sep) methods that simplify a common use case.
> The find(S) method is often used to get an index which is then used to
> slice the string and obtain the pieces that are before and after the
> separator. partition(sep) condenses this pattern into a single method
> call that returns a 3-tuple containing the substring before the
> separator, the separator itself, and the substring after the separator.
> If the separator isn't found, the first element of the tuple is the
> entire string and the other two elements are empty. rpartition(sep) also
> returns a 3-tuple but starts searching from the end of the string; the
> "r" stands for 'reverse'.
>
> Some examples:
>
>
>  >>> ('http://www.python.org').partition('://')
> ('http', '://', 'www.python.org')
>  >>> ('file:/usr/share/doc/index.html').partition('://')
> ('file:/usr/share/doc/index.html', '', '')
>  >>> (u'Subject: a quick question').partition(':')
> (u'Subject', u':', u' a quick question')
>  >>> 'www.python.org'.rpartition('.')
> ('www.python', '.', 'org')
>  >>> 'www.python.org'.rpartition(':')
> ('', '', 'www.python.org')
>
> (Implemented by Fredrik Lundh following a suggestion by Raymond Hettinger.)