str.index() and str.find() versus only list.index()

[Ian Kelly]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 9:23 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Jul 2015 01:12 pm, Ian Kelly wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 10:56 AM, Roel Schroeven <roel at roelschroeven.net>
>> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Quick question: why does str have both index() and find(), while list
>>> only has index()? Is there a reason for that, or is it just an historical
>>> accident?
>>
>> Historical accident, I think. If it were to be redone, I doubt that
>> str.find would exist. The problem with it is that it returns -1 to
>> indicate that the argument was not found, but -1 is a valid index into
>> the string. This is a potential source of hard-to-find bugs.
>
> Correct. But rather than removing it, it would be better to take a leaf out
> of re.match's book and return None as the sentinel. That would eliminate
> the "using -1 as a valid index" bug.

I disagree on both counts.

>>> s = 'abc'
>>> s[None:None]
'abc'

Better IMO to just have the one non-redundant method that raises an
exception rather than returning anything that could possibly be
interpreted as a string index.