Question

I need to split a string using python but only on the first instance of the delimiter in the string.

My code:

for line in conf.readlines():
    if re.search('jvm.args',line):
        key,value= split('=',line)
        default_args=val

The problem is line, which contains jvm.args looks like this:

'jvm.args = -Dappdynamics.com=true, -Dsomeotherparam=false,'

I want my code to split jvm.args into key and value variables incidently upon the first ‘=’. Does re.split do this by default? If not a suggestion would be appreciated!

Answer 1

This is what str.partition is for:

>>> 'jvm.args= -Dappdynamics.com=true, -Dsomeotherparam=false,'.partition('=')
('jvm.args', '=', ' -Dappdynamics.com=true, -Dsomeotherparam=false,')

From the docs:

str.partition(sep)

Split the string at the first occurrence of sep,
and return a 3-tuple containing the part before the separator, the
separator itself, and the part after the separator. If the separator
is not found, return a 3-tuple containing the string itself, followed
by two empty strings.

New in version 2.5.