Idiom for "last word in a string"

Wed Sep 23 14:58:01 EDT 2009

On Sep 23, 2:47 pm, Grant Edwards <inva... at invalid.invalid> wrote:
> I recently ran across this construct for grabbing the last
> (whitespace delimited) word in a string:
>>    s.rsplit(None,1)[1]
>> It was somewhat obvious from the context what it was supposed
> to do, but it took a bit of Googling to figure out exactly what
> was going on.
>> When I want the last word in a string, I've always done this:
>>    s.split()[-1]
>> I was wondering what the advantage of the rsplit(None,1)[1]
> approach would be other than inducing people to learn about the
> maxsplit argument that is accepted by the split() methods?
>> --
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hello,
perhaps rsplit generates as many elements in the list as absolutely
necesary compared to the whole list returned by split()?
konstantin