Extract all words that begin with x

[Aahz]

In article <mailman.11.1273548189.32709.python-list at python.org>,
Terry Reedy  <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>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.

And if it is slower, so what?  Using startswith() makes for faster
reading of the code for me, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n nx prgrmmng.