Benefits of os.path.splitext over regular .split?

Question

In this other question, the votes clearly show that the os.path.splitext function is preferred over the simple .split(\'.\')[-1] string manipulatio

Answer 1

A clearly defined and documented method to get the file extension would always be preferred over splitting a string willy nilly because that method would be more fragile for various reasons.

Edit: This is not language specific.