python - Pythonic way to split a string and unpack into variables?

Question

Simple question: given a string

string = "Word1 Word2 Word3 ... WordN"

is there a pythonic way to do this?

firstWord = string.split(" ")[0]
otherWords = string.split(" ")[1:]

Like an unpacking or something?

Thank you

Answer 1

Since Python 3 and PEP 3132, you can use extended unpacking.

This way, you can unpack arbitrary string containing any number of words. The first will be stored into the variable first, and the others will belong to the list (possibly empty) others.

first, *others = string.split()

Also, note that default delimiter for .split() is a space, so you do not need to specify it explicitly.