Found a neat pair of methods that were added in Python 2.5 — it’s like split/index except it handles breaking the string into two elements for you. A tuple is returned with the part before the separator, the separator, and the part after the separator. If the separator is not found, element 0 and 1 are empty strings.

 

C:\Users\lisa> python
Python 3.13.3
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>> test = “This is a string | with pipe characters as | delimiters in the string”
>>> print(test.rpartition(“|”)[0])
This is a string | with pipe characters as
>>> print(test.partition(“|”)[0])
This is a string
>>>