Split text after the second occurrence of character

Solution 1:

You can do something like this:

>>> a = "some-sample-filename-to-split"
>>> "-".join(a.split("-", 2)[:2])
'some-sample'

a.split("-", 2) will split the string upto the second occurrence of -.

a.split("-", 2)[:2] will give the first 2 elements in the list. Then simply join the first 2 elements.

OR

You could use regular expression : ^([\w]+-[\w]+)

>>> import re
>>> reg = r'^([\w]+-[\w]+)'
>>> re.match(reg, a).group()
'some-sample'

EDIT: As discussed in the comments, here is what you need:

def hyphen_split(a):
    if a.count("-") == 1:
        return a.split("-")[0]
    return "-".join(a.split("-", 2)[:2])

>>> hyphen_split("some-sample-filename-to-split")
'some-sample'
>>> hyphen_split("some-sample")
'some'

Solution 2:

A generic form to split a string into halves on the nth occurence of the separator would be:

def split(strng, sep, pos):
    strng = strng.split(sep)
    return sep.join(strng[:pos]), sep.join(strng[pos:])

If pos is negative it will count the occurrences from the end of string.

>>> strng = 'some-sample-filename-to-split'
>>> split(strng, '-', 3)
('some-sample-filename', 'to-split')
>>> split(strng, '-', -4)
('some', 'sample-filename-to-split')
>>> split(strng, '-', 1000)
('some-sample-filename-to-split', '')
>>> split(strng, '-', -1000)
('', 'some-sample-filename-to-split')

Solution 3:

You can use str.index():

def hyphen_split(s):
    pos = s.index('-')
    try:
        return s[:s.index('-', pos + 1)]
    except ValueError:
        return s[:pos]

test:

>>> hyphen_split("some-sample-filename-to-split")
'some-sample'
>>> hyphen_split("some-sample")
'some'

Solution 4:

You could use regular expressions:

import re

file_label = re.search('(.*?-.*?)-', fname).group(1)