This might be a silly idea, but I was wondering about forcing split() to return at least X number of items. For example, I might be getting a comma separated string and i want to split it up into names, but I might have less than all of them. If it is just 0, 1, or 2, I can use partition(), but any more and that doesn't work. Besides, I don't care if the separator is there, just to get the values. Might also make sense to give the values to give by default. Example of implementing this: def split(self, sep=None, max_splits=None, min_items=None): parts = self.split(sep, max_splits) if len(parts) < min_items: parts.extend([None] * (min_items - len(parts))) return parts Use would be like this: a, b, c, d = "1,2,3".split(',', None, 4) Probably not a great idea, but I'm tossing it out there, anyway. -- Read my blog! I depend on your acceptance of my opinion! I am interesting! http://techblog.ironfroggy.com/ Follow me if you're into that sort of thing: http://www.twitter.com/ironfroggy