Slicing vs .startswith

[Fredrik Lundh]

RE: Slicing vs .startswithFacundo Batista wrote:

See PEP 08:
    - Avoid slicing strings when checking for prefixes or suffixes.
      Use startswith() and endswith() instead, since they are faster,
      cleaner and less error prone.  E.g.:
        No:  if foo[:3] == 'bar':
        Yes: if foo.startswith('bar'):
      The exception is if your code must work with Python 1.5.2 (but
      let's hope not!).

the PEP isn't telling the truth:

> python timeit.py -s "s='egg&bacon'" "s[:3] == 'egg'"
100000 loops, best of 3: 4.43 usec per loop

> python timeit.py -s "s='egg&bacon'" "s.startswith('egg')"
100000 loops, best of 3: 7.6 usec per loop

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