Split string into two parts only [duplicate]

Question

I have a string

s = 'abcd qwrre qwedsasd zxcwsacds'

I want to split any string in only two parts at the first occurrence of a whitespace. i.e. a='abcd' and b='qwrre qwedsasd zxcwsacds'

If I use a, b=split(' ') it gives me an error because there are too many values to unpack.

Answer 1

You could use a,b = split(' ', 1).

The second argument 1 is the maximum number of splits that would be done.

s = 'abcd efgh hijk'
a,b = s.split(' ', 1)
print(a) #abcd
print(b) #efgh hijk

For more information on the string split function, see str.split in the manual.

Answer 2

From the Python docs

str.split(sep=None, maxsplit=-1)

Return a list of the words in the string, using sep as the delimiter string. If maxsplit is given, at most maxsplit splits are done (thus, the list will have at most maxsplit+1 elements). If maxsplit is not specified or -1, then there is no limit on the number of splits (all possible splits are made).

'1 2 3'.split(maxsplit=1)
# ['1', '2 3']