I'm going to keep all of this code here. I'm going to comment it out. And the reason for that is because I want you to be able to see both of these processes side by side because they are similar but they have some very key differences. You're most likely going to be using split in your day to day Python development. However, it is nice whenever you want to have a single spot a single delimiter that separates a single string into two different parts. Three parts of you count the delimiter itself but that's when you should use partition but was split.

Let's give a practical example of when you would use this. So I'm going to create a variable here called tags so you can imagine this being the tags for a youtube video or a blog post or anything like that. It's going to be a single string so I could say Python comma coding comma programming comma development

tags = 'python,coding,programming,development'

and so that is a string but it has a number of commas that separate each one of these tags and so what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to use our ability to simply redefine and reassign this variable I'm going to say tags is equal to tags.split and in fact, I think I'm going to change my mind on this and the reason is because it's considered bad practice to reassign a variable of one type to a different type so we're split is going to do is it is actually going to return a list so it's good to start with the string right here and then it's going to convert that into a list of elements and so if you are a developer working on some application and at one point the tags variable is a string but at a different point it turns into a list that might. You would definitely run into some bugs because if you called say the uppercase or you called some kind of method that you can only use on a string. You called it. When it was a list you'd get an error.

So let's just do it right, right from the beginning. I'm going to say "list of tags" and this is going to call tags.split and very much like the partition function. What split does is it takes in an argument of where you want to split your string. So in this case I want to split it at each spot where it finds a comma and so that is going to give us 4 different elements in our list. So now I can simply say "print list of tags" and it should give us our list. So I run that you can see that now we have a list

which if you're coming from a different type of programming language such as Javascript or Ruby. This is called an array but it is a list in python and we'll get into that in our collection section. But we have our full set of elements here we have Python coding programming and development.

This is a completely different type of data structure so now it's a collection and we can use it however we want. We could go and we could add each one of these elements into a database we could show them on the website with a very specific kind of look and feel. Once we've converted it into a collection it makes it much easier to be able to work with that. So this is a great example and a very practical example of when you would want to use split.

Now split also can be run without any arguments at all. So if I were to take this and call tag split here and pass in no arguments. You'll see if I run this you'll see that we get some different behavior

the way that split works by default. If you don't pass in any arguments is it simply converts your string into an array or into a list and it will be a list with a single element. Notice that it did not break each one of these down into its own element instead. Now you have this list with one single one that's filled with the string and the part of the reason why I wanted to do that was because if you look at this code right here on line 8 if you see this string it does look kind of similar to what we have right here so I wanted to show you that they are very different what split does is it converts this into a list so that each one of these is now its own element is its own standalone string whereas what we had here on line 8. And then also what happens if you call split without any arguments. It is a single string object and so that is where the difference is. So that's the difference between split and split with no arguments and then hopefully you can also see the difference on partition.

I picked out these examples very intentionally. And the reason is because I wanted to show you a great example of when you would use partition vs split. So I'm going to continue our example. And let's imagine that we wanted to use split with this heading.

Now technically it would work if we had started out with only this example or I should say. Yeah so I'm just going to do everything from the comma I'm just going to take out just like this

and so if I wanted to call heading and just perform some type of reassignment so I could say heading list and then heading split and pass this in. Just like this. I can print this out and let's give us some more room just so you can see it. So you say print now the heading list and then I will print it and you can see we have python and introduction so we get back this list of elements. And that is nice. However, one thing that is very helpful when it comes to using partition is what it returns versus what split returns.

Partition returns a tuple and a split returns a list. Now if you are not familiar with Python data structures then that probably doesn't mean very much to you. We will get into the key differences between the two. The key difference right now is that it is very easy to perform things like variable deconstruction like what we did right here with a partition or with a tuple which is what a partition return so whenever you're performing a task like this where you have some values you're pretty confident about the structure on those values such as I'm coming in from an API or some type of source like that and so you know that you're always going to have this type of structure, then using partition makes a lot of sense and it's easy to use and you can split that tuple up into as many pieces as you need and then you can use those.

So right here

in this case, you want 3 different elements whereas what it does is it's much more flexible it works on a much wider array of types of strings such as what we have here with tags.

If we were to call partition on tags all we would end up getting is the first element we would then get the comma and then we would get all the rest of these as a single string and so in that case partition would not be a very good choice at all but split allows us to break this entire string into as many elements as the string contains and then we can work with all of those independently.

And so that's really what I wanted you to see was to be able to see the difference on when you would want to use partition when you'd want to use split. In regards to my own practical experience I would say probably when I need to perform a task like this I probably use split about 95 percent of the time partition about 5 percent of the time because typically when I want to split a string up it's pretty rare that I need to only have three elements. I usually try to get or I usually am trying to get all of the elements inside of it so that's one of the key differences by definitely recommend for you to take this code. Play around with that play around with some examples that you may see in applications that you work with to be able to see when you'd want to use one versus the other.

Code

tags = 'python,coding,programming,development'

list_of_tags = tags.split(',')
list_of_tags = tags.split()

print(list_of_tags)

heading = "Python: An Introduction"

heading, subheading = heading.split(': ')

print(heading)
print(subheading)