A curious bit of code...

[Ethan Furman]

On 02/13/2014 11:17 AM, Neil Cerutti wrote:
> On 2014-02-13, forman.simon at gmail.com <forman.simon at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> 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?
>
> I think the following would occur to someone first:
>
> if key[0] == '<' and key[-1] == '>':
>      ...
>
> It is wrong to avoid the obvious. Needlessly ornate or clever
> code will only irritate the person who has to read it later; most
> likely yourself.

Not whet the obvious is wrong:

-> key = ''
--> if key[0] == '<' and key[-1] == '>':
...   print "good key!"
... else:
...   print "bad key"
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
IndexError: string index out of range

--
~Ethan~