Matching a string up to a word

[Peter Hansen]

Bengt Richter wrote:
> On Wed, 04 Sep 2002 22:31:46 -0400, Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:
> 
>>I was thinking of something like that.  This should do it then:
>>
>>  filename = ' '.join(field.split(' ')[1:-4])
>>
>>That is, provided you never expect to see more than one consecutive
>>space in your filenames...
> 
> Why should that hurt, if the head and tail items are consistently separated
> by single spaces?
> 
>  >>> line = '12345 /some  weird/path with multiple-    -spaces Wed Sep 4 2002.'
>  >>> line.split(' ')
>  ['12345', '/some', '', 'weird/path', 'with', 'multiple-', '', '', '', '-spaces', 'Wed', 'Sep', '4', '2002.']
>  >>> line.split(' ')[1:-4]
>  ['/some', '', 'weird/path', 'with', 'multiple-', '', '', '', '-spaces']
>  >>> ' '.join(line.split(' ')[1:-4])
>  '/some  weird/path with multiple-    -spaces'

Oops!  I was going by the behaviour with just .split(), which I tried 
originally (but which does other whitespace too), and didn't realize the 
explicit .split(' ') would do what it does.  Cool. :)

-Peter