split string in python to get one value?

Question

Need help, let's assume that I have a string 'Sam-Person' in a variable called 'input'

name, kind = input.split('-')

By doing the above, I get two variable with different strings 'Sam' and 'Person'

is there a way to only get the first value name = 'Sam' without the need of the extra variable 'kind' and without having to work with lists?

When doing this, assuming that I was going to get only 'Sam':

name = input.split('-')

I get a list, and then I can access the values by index name[0] or name[1], but it is not what I want, I just want to directly get 'Sam' into the variable 'name', is there a way to do that or an alternative to split?

Answer 1

Assign the first item directly to the variable.

>>> string = 'Sam-Person'
>>> name = string.split('-')[0]
>>> name
'Sam'

You can specify maxsplit argument, because you want to get only the first item.

>>> name = string.split('-', 1)[0]