Very dumb question

Wed Oct 12 10:28:57 EDT 2005

Laszlo Zsolt Nagy wrote:

> I have a program with this code fragment:
> 
> print len(data)
> print data[:50]
> raise SystemExit
> 
> This prints:
> 
> 20381
> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
> 
> But if I change 50 to 51
> 
> print len(data)
> print data[:51]
> raise SystemExit
> 
> then it prints
> 
> 20381
> !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"

The closest I can get to your situation is

[on linux]
>>> print "abc\rx"[:4]
abc
>>> print "abc\rx"[:5]
xbc

i. e. a character after a 'carriage return' ('\r') overwrites part of the
string which therefore doesn't seem to grow. Try 

print repr(data[:51]) 

to see what's really in your data string.

Peter