Slice objects. How to apply them to strings?

[Dale Strickland-Clark]

Dale Strickland-Clark <dale at riverhall.NOTHANKS.co.uk> wrote:

>I'm using Python 2.1 here but this still seems to apply on 2.2
>
>I have a little string-based class which needs to emulate strings for
>most things. This includes slicing.
>
>So I need a __getitem__ magic method. 
>
>This will get passed a slice object.
>
>How am I supposed to translate this into a string slice? 
>
>This seems to be the tidiest I can come up with and it's a mess:
>
>def __getitem__(self, item):
>    if item.step:
>        return self.s[item.start: item.stop: item.step]
>    if item.start:
>        return self.s[item.start: item.stop]
>    return self.s[item.stop]
>
>If 'item' is a slice object, shouldn't I just be able to say:
>
>    self.s[item]
>?
>
>Wouldn't this be really sensible?
>
>What's worse, is that I can't even do this:
>
>import operator
>operator.getitem(self.s, item)
>
>Somebody please tell me I'm being dim and I've missed something. How
>do you apply a slice object to a sequence?
>
>Thanks

Can anyone shed any light on this for me?

Thanks.
--
Dale Strickland-Clark
Riverhall Systems Ltd