How to split a sequence according to a predicate?

Partitioning is one of those itertools recipes that does just that. It uses tee() to make sure it's iterating the collection in one pass despite the multiple iterators, the builtin filter() function to grab items that satisfies the predicate as well as filterfalse() to get the opposite effect of the filter. This is as close as you're going to get at a standard/builtin method.

def partition(pred, iterable):
    'Use a predicate to partition entries into false entries and true entries'
    # partition(is_odd, range(10)) --> 0 2 4 6 8   and  1 3 5 7 9
    t1, t2 = tee(iterable)
    return filterfalse(pred, t1), filter(pred, t2)

I know you said you didn't want to write your own function, but I can't imagine why. Your solutions involve writing your own code, you just aren't modularizing them into functions.

This does exactly what you want, is understandable, and only evaluates the predicate once per element:

def splitter(data, pred):
    yes, no = [], []
    for d in data:
        if pred(d):
            yes.append(d)
        else:
            no.append(d)
    return [yes, no]

If you want it to be more compact (for some reason):

def splitter(data, pred):
    yes, no = [], []
    for d in data:
        (yes if pred(d) else no).append(d)
    return [yes, no]