new string method in 2.5 (partition)

[Tim Chase]

> But you raise a good point. Notice this:
> 
>  >>> s = 'hello, world, how are you'
> 
>  >>> s.split(',')
> ['hello', ' world', ' how are you']
> 
>  >>> s.partition(',')
> ('hello', ',', ' world, how are you')
> 
> split will return all substrings. partition (and rpartition) only return 
> the substrings before and after the first occurrence of the argument.

The split()/rsplit() functions do take an optional argument for 
the maximum number of splits to make, just FYI...

 >>> help("".split)
Help on built-in function split:

split(...)
     S.split([sep [,maxsplit]]) -> list of strings

     Return a list of the words in the string S, using sep as the
     delimiter string.  If maxsplit is given, at most maxsplit
     splits are done. If sep is not specified or is None, any
     whitespace string is a separator.



(as I use this on a regular basis when mashing up various text 
files in a data conversion process)

-tkc