list unpack trick?

[Siegmund Fuehringer]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 08:02:38PM -0800, aurora wrote:
> I find that I use some list unpacking construct very often:
> 
> 	name, value = s.split('=',1)
> 
> So that 'a=1' unpack as name='a' and value='1' and 'a=b=c' unpack as  
> name='a' and value='b=c'.
> 
> The only issue is when s does not contain the character '=', let's say it  
> is 'xyz', the result list has a len of 1 and the unpacking would fail. Is  
> there some really handy trick to pack the result list into len of 2 so  
> that it unpack as name='xyz' and value=''?

what about:
s.find( '=' )!=-1 and s.split( '=', 1 ) or [s,'']

bye bye - sifu