Partial list unpack in Python

This may be of no use to you unless you’re using Python 3. However, for completeness, it’s worth noting that the extended tuple unpacking introduced there allows you to do things like:

>>> a, *b = "length=25".split("=")
>>> a,b
("length", ['25'])
>>> a, *b = "DEFAULT_LENGTH".split("=")
>>> a,b
("DEFAULT_LENGTH", [])

I.e. tuple unpacking now works similarly to how it does in argument unpacking, so you can denote “the rest of the items” with *, and get them as a (possibly empty) list.

Partition is probably the best solution for what you’re doing however.