[Python-Dev] Fwd: Problem withthe API for str.rpartition() (original) (raw)

Raymond Hettinger rhettinger at ewtllc.com
Tue Sep 5 19:46:01 CEST 2006

ISTM this is just begging for newbie (and maybe not-so-newbie) confusion. Why not just document both as returning (left, sep, right) which seems the most obvious description of what the methods return?

I'm fine with that (though it's a little sad that we think the rather basic concepts of head and tail are beyond the grasp of typical pythonistas).

Changing to left/sep/right will certainly disambiguate questions about the ordering of the return tuple. OTOH, there is some small loss in that the head/tail terminology is highly suggestive of how to use the function when making succesive partitions.

Raymond

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