[Python-3000] Droping find/rfind? (original) (raw)

Steven Bethard steven.bethard at gmail.com
Wed Aug 23 16:31:55 CEST 2006

On 8/23/06, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

On 8/23/06, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote: > I agree with Tim -- if we have to get rid of one of them, let's get > rid of index/rindex and keep find/rfind. Catching the exception is > much less convenient than testing for -1.

But the -1 is very error-prone, as many have experienced. Also, many uses of find() should be replaced by 'in' (long ago, 'in' only accepted one-character strings on the left and find() was the best alternative) or partition().

FWLIW, I only started using Python at the tail end of 2.2, so the 'in' started working with substrings pretty early for me. I do a fair bit of work with text (my research is in natural language processing) and yet I have exactly zero instances of [r]find() in my code. So I at least wouldn't miss them if they were gone.

STeVe

I'm not in-sane. Indeed, I am so far out of sane that you appear a tiny blip on the distant coast of sanity. --- Bucky Katt, Get Fuzzy

More information about the Python-3000 mailing list