Terry Reedy wrote:
"Shane Hathaway" <shane@hathawaymix.org> wrote in message news:4314E51B.1050507@hathawaymix.org...
You can do both: make partition() return a sequence with attributes, similar to os.stat(). However, I would call the attributes "before", "sep", and "after".
One could see that as a special-case back-compatibility kludge that maybe should disappear in 3.0. My impression is that the attributes were added precisely because unpacking several related attributes into several disconnected vars was found to be often awkward. The sequencing is arbitrary and one often needs less that all attributes.
Good point. Unlike os.stat(), it's very easy to remember the order of the return values from partition(). I'll add my +1 vote for part() and +0.9 for partition(). As for the regex version of partition(), I wonder if a little cleanup effort is in order so that new regex features don't have to be added in two places. I suggest a builtin for compiling regular expressions, perhaps called "regex". It would be easier to use the builtin than to import the re module, so there would no longer be a reason for the re module to have functions that duplicate the regular expression methods. Shane