TypeError: split() takes no keyword arguments in Python 2.x

Question

I am trying to separate a section of a document into its different components which are separated by ampersands. This is what I have:

name,function,range,w,h,k,frac,constraint = str.split(str="&", num=8)

Error:

TypeError: split() takes no keyword arguments

Can someone explain the error to me and also provide an alternate method for me to make this work?