Numpy String Partitioning: Perform Multiple Splits

I have an array of strings, each containing one or more words. I want to split / partition the array on a separator (blank in my case) with as many splits as there are separators in the element containing the most separators. numpy.char.partition however only performs a single split, regardless of how often the separator appears:

I've got:

>>> a = np.array(['word', 'two words', 'and three words'])
>>> np.char.partition(a, ' ')

>>> array([['word', '', ''],
       ['two', ' ', 'words'],
       ['and', ' ', 'three words']], dtype='<U8')

I'd like to have:

>>> array([['word', '', '', '', ''],
       ['two', ' ', 'words', '', ''],
       ['and', ' ', 'three', ' ', 'words']], dtype='<U8')

Approach #1

Those partition functions doesn't seem to partition for all the occurrences. To solve for our case, we can use np.char.split to get the split strings and then masking,array-assignment, like so -

def partitions(a, sep):
    # Split based on sep
    s = np.char.split(a,sep)

    # Get concatenated split strings
    cs = np.concatenate(s)

    # Get params
    N = len(a)
    l = np.array(list(map(len,s)))
    el = 2*l-1
    ncols = el.max()

    out = np.zeros((N,ncols),dtype=cs.dtype)

    # Setup valid mask that starts at fist col until the end for each row
    mask = el[:,None] > np.arange(el.max())

    # Assign sepeter into valid ones
    out[mask] = sep

    # Setup valid mask that has True at postions where words are to be assigned
    mask[:,1::2] = 0

    # Assign words
    out[mask] = cs
    return out

Sample runs -

In [32]: a = np.array(['word', 'two words', 'and three words'])

In [33]: partitions(a, sep=' ')
Out[33]: 
array([['word', '', '', '', ''],
       ['two', ' ', 'words', '', ''],
       ['and', ' ', 'three', ' ', 'words']], dtype='<U5')

In [44]: partitions(a, sep='ord')
Out[44]: 
array([['w', 'ord', ''],
       ['two w', 'ord', 's'],
       ['and three w', 'ord', 's']], dtype='<U11')

Approach #2

Here's another with a loop, to save on memory -

def partitions_loopy(a, sep):
    # Get params
    N = len(a)
    l = np.char.count(a, sep)+1
    ncols = 2*l.max()-1
    out = np.zeros((N,ncols),dtype=a.dtype)
    for i,(a_i,L) in enumerate(zip(a,l)):
        ss = a_i.split(sep)
        out[i,1:2*L-1:2] = sep
        out[i,:2*L:2] = ss
    return out