Comments on my first script?

[Aidan]

Chris wrote:
> On Jun 13, 9:38 am, Phillip B Oldham <phillip.old... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Thanks guys. Those comments are really helpful. The odd semi-colon is
>> my PHP background. Will probably be a hard habbit to break, that
>> one! ;) If I do accidentally drop a semi-colon at the end of the line,
>> will that cause any weird errors?
>>
>> Also, Chris, can you explain this:
>> a, b = line.split(': ')[:2]
>>
>> I understand the first section, but I've not seen [:2] before.
> 
> That's slicing at work.  What it is doing is only taking the first two
> elements of the list that is built by the line.split.

slicing is a very handy feature... I'll expand on it a little

OK so, first I'll create a sequence of integers

 >>> seq = range(10)
 >>> seq
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

"take element with index 4 and everything after it"

 >>> seq[4:]
[4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

"take everything up to, but not including, the element with index 4"

 >>> seq[:4]
[0, 1, 2, 3]

"take the element with index 3 and everything up to, but not including, 
the element with index 6"

 >>> seq[3:6]
[3, 4, 5]

then there's the step argument

"take every second element from the whole sequence"

 >>> seq[::2]
[0, 2, 4, 6, 8]

"take every second element from the element with index 2 up to, but not 
including, the element with index 8"

 >>> seq[2:8:2]
[2, 4, 6]


Hope that helps.