[Python-3000] Droping find/rfind?

[Brian Holmes]

On 8/22/06, Josiah Carlson <jcarlson at uci.edu> wrote:
>
>
> "Guido van Rossum" <guido at python.org> wrote:
> > At today's sprint, one of the volunteers completed a patch to rip out
> > find() and rfind(), replacing all calls with index()/rindex(). But now
> > I'm getting cold feet -- is this really a good idea? (It's been listed
> > in PEP 3100 for a long time, but I haven't thought about it much,
> > really.)
> >
> > What do people think?


[snip]

One of the issues with the -1 return on find failure is that it is
> ambiguous, one must really check for a -1 return. Here's an API that is
> non-ambiguous:
>     x.search(y, start=0, stop=sys.maxint, count=sys.maxint)
>
> Which will return a list of up to count non-overlapping examples of y in
> x from start to stop.  On failure, it returns an empty list.  This
> particular API is at least as powerful as the currently existing [r]find
> one, is unambiguous, etc.  It also has a not accidental similarity to
> x.split(y, count=sys.maxint), which has served Python for quite a while,
> though this would differ in that rather than always returning a list of
> at least 1, it could return an empty list.
>
> Its functionality is somewhat mirrored by re.finditer, but the above
> search function can be easily turned into rsearch, whereas re is
> forward-only.


[snip]

- Josiah
>
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+1

I think that would make a great addition to Py3k, or even 2.6.

- Brian
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