Is it possible to split and assign a string in a single statement?

Question

Can a string be split and some of the words be assigned to a tuple?

For instance:

a = "Jack and Jill went up the hill"
(user1, user2) = a.split().pick(1,3) # picks 1 and 3 element in the list.

Is such a one liner possible? If so what is the syntax.

Answer 1

If you want to get fancy, you could use operator.itemgetter:

Return a callable object that fetches item from its operand using the operand’s __getitem__() method. If multiple items are specified, returns a tuple of lookup values.

Example:

>>> from operator import itemgetter
>>> pick = itemgetter(0, 2)
>>> pick("Jack and Jill went up the hill".split())
('Jack', 'Jill')

Or as a one-liner (w/o the import):

>>> user1, user2 = itemgetter(0, 2)("Jack and Jill went up the hill".split())

Answer 2

You can do something like this

a = "Jack and Jill went up the hill"
user1, _, user2, _ = a.split(" ", 3)

where _ means that we don't care of the value, and split(" ", 3) split the string in 4 segments.

Answer 3

Slicing supports a step parameter

a = "Jack and Jill went up the hill"
(user1 , user2) = a.split()[0:4:2] #picks 1 and 3 element in the list

but while it's possible to write funky oneliners in Python for sure it's not the best language for that kind of exercise.