[python] Splitting on first occurrence

What would be the best way to split a string on the first occurrence of a delimiter?

For example:

"123mango abcd mango kiwi peach"

splitting on the first mango to get:

"abcd mango kiwi peach"

>>> s = "123mango abcd mango kiwi peach"
>>> s.split("mango", 1)
['123', ' abcd mango kiwi peach']
>>> s.split("mango", 1)[1]
' abcd mango kiwi peach'

For me the better approach is that:

s.split('mango', 1)[-1]

...because if happens that occurrence is not in the string you'll get "IndexError: list index out of range".

Therefore -1 will not get any harm cause number of occurrences is already set to one.

df.columnname[1].split('.', 1)

This will split data with the first occurrence of '.' in the string or data frame column value.

You can also use str.partition:

>>> text = "123mango abcd mango kiwi peach"

>>> text.partition("mango")
('123', 'mango', ' abcd mango kiwi peach')

>>> text.partition("mango")[-1]
' abcd mango kiwi peach'

>>> text.partition("mango")[-1].lstrip()  # if whitespace strip-ing is needed
'abcd mango kiwi peach'

The advantage of using str.partition is that it's always gonna return a tuple in the form:

(<pre>, <separator>, <post>)

So this makes unpacking the output really flexible as there's always going to be 3 elements in the resulting tuple.