Python language basics 38: how to partition a string

Introduction

In the previous post we looked at the split function that operates on strings. We saw how it could split up a string into its elements using a delimiter.

In this post we’ll look at the partition function of the string type.

String partitioning

String partitioning is somewhat similar to splitting. The partition function accepts a partitioning string argument and returns the elements to the left and right of that argument including the partitioner itself. The elements are returned in a tuple. Imagine you have the time formatted as “hour:minutes” then you can partition that string as follows:

time = "14:55"
partitioned = time.partition(':')
print(partitioned)

‘partitioned’ will become…

(’14’, ‘:’, ’55’)

You can access the individual elements by an indexer as we saw before:

hour = partitioned[0]
minute = partitioned[2]

Alternatively you can assign the individual values in the partition to variables:

hour, partitioner, minute = time.partition(':')
print(' '.join([hour, minute]))

…which prints “14 55”.

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