It’s funny because what I found confusing initially reading the code is the behaviour of split and I still do after the article. I know see that this is because

It’s funny because what I found confusing initially reading the code is the behaviour of split and I still do after the article. I know see that this is because the article uses a magic value and magic values are the bane of readability. See, the first split use made me think it always returned the left and right part after splitting at the first match - 0 being left and 1 right. This is not the case. The code implicitly relies on this being a url. But then the second split is accessed with the weird [-3:] which I have to assume to mean the last 3 elements. I assumed then that split must return a list but started wondering: why 3 elements only? I still don’t know. I wasn’t helped by the single letter named variables either. I think people might want to focus on the basics before venturing into grand consideration about splitting lines and putting code in function. The one liner with proper names is too long but understandable: last_three_url_param_values = lambda(query_string: query_string.split(‘=‘)[1], url.split(‘?’)[1].split(‘&’)[-3:])