A curious bit of code...

[forman.simon at gmail.com]

I ran across this and I thought there must be a better way of doing it, but then after further consideration I wasn't so sure.

  if key[:1] + key[-1:] == '<>': ...


Some possibilities that occurred to me:

  if key.startswith('<') and key.endswith('>'): ...

and:

  if (key[:1], key[-1:]) == ('<', '>'): ...


I haven't run these through a profiler yet, but it seems like the original might be the fastest after all?