Idiom for "last word in a string"

Wed Sep 23 15:16:27 EDT 2009

At 2009年9月23日 18:47:05 +0000 (UTC),
Grant Edwards 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?
>
s.rsplit(None, 1) is a cheaper operation because it splits the string
*only once*.