Matching a constant string at beginning

[François Pinard]

Hello, people.  Some have a nice idiom for the following?

I first wrote, a few months ago by now, I guess:

    if re.match('Simonsen', line):

and to later speed up things a little, for some little while:

    if line[:8] == 'Simonsen':

Yet, computing that `8' index is tedious, and writing:

    if line[:len('Simonsen')] == 'Simonsen':

is rather tedious.  Of course, I could write a very small function to
match a constant string at the beginning of another, but there just must
be some idiom for doing this.

I also tried:

    if string.find(line, 'Simonsen') == 0:

but this scans the whole line for nothing, this is not better.

So, do I have no choice then write that very small function? :-)

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard