Another Wart! string.find() [ was: namespace issue? ]

Chris Barker chrishbarker at home.net
Fri Jun 22 13:15:23 EDT 2001


Andrew Dalke wrote:

> index(s, sub [,start [,end]]) -> int
> 
>  Return the lowest index in s where substring sub is found,
>  such that sub is contained within s[start,end].  Optional
>  arguments start and end are interpreted as in slice notation.
> 
>  Raise ValueError if not found.

YEECCHHH!!!

Never raise an exception for a perfectly normal, it will happen all the
time event. I do like the return None option however. Returning -1 was
an unfortunate choice for two reasons:

it is not a false value

it is a valid index into a string

This is all kind of useless discussion however as string.find is in far
too much code as it is. Besides, it really isn't all that bad anyway.

-Chris


-- 
Christopher Barker,
Ph.D.                                                           
ChrisHBarker at home.net                 ---           ---           ---
http://members.home.net/barkerlohmann ---@@       -----@@       -----@@
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Oil Spill Modeling                ------   @    ------   @   ------   @
Water Resources Engineering       -------      ---------     --------    
Coastal and Fluvial Hydrodynamics --------------------------------------
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