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

1) simple split('.')[-1] won't work correctly for the path as C:\foo.bar\Makefile so you need to extract basename first with os.path.basename(), and even in this case it will fail to split file without extension correctly. os.path.splitext do this under the hood.

2) Despite the fact os.path.splitext is cross-platform solution it's not ideal. Let's looking at the special files with leading dot, e.g. .cvsignore, .bzrignore, .hgignore (they are very popular in some VCS as special files). os.path.splitext will return entire file name as extension, although it does not seems right for me. Because in this case name without extension is empty string. Although this is intended behavior of Python standard library, it's may be not what user wants actually.