Is there a way to split a string by every nth separator in Python?

Question

For example, if I had the following string:

\"this-is-a-string\"

Could I split it by every 2nd \"-\" rather than every \"-\" so that it returns two values (\

Answer 1

l = 'this-is-a-string'.split()
nl = []
ss = ""
c = 0
for s in l:
   c += 1
   if c%2 == 0:
       ss = s
   else:
       ss = "%s-%s"%(ss,s)
       nl.insert(ss)

print nl