Extract all words that begin with x

[Terry Reedy]

On 5/10/2010 5:35 AM, James Mills wrote:
> On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 6:50 PM, Xavier Ho<contact at xavierho.com>  wrote:
>> Have I missed something, or wouldn't this work just as well:
>>
>>>>> list_of_strings = ['2', 'awes', '3465sdg', 'dbsdf', 'asdgas']
>>>>> [word for word in list_of_strings if word[0] == 'a']
>> ['awes', 'asdgas']
>
> I would do this for completeness (just in case):
>
>>>>> [word for word in list_of_strings if word and word[0] == 'a']
>
> Just guards against empty strings which may or may not be in the list.

  ... word[0:1] does the same thing. All Python programmers should learn 
to use slicing to extract a  char from a string that might be empty.
The method call of .startswith() will be slower, I am sure.