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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Aug 24 04:39:29 CEST 2006

I don't find the current attempts to come up with a better substring search API useful.

We did a lot of thinking about this not too long ago, and the result was the addition of [r]partition() to 2.5 and the intent to drop [r]find() from py3k as both redundant with [r]index() and error-prone (I think I just found another bug in logging.init.py:

def _fixupChildren(self, ph, alogger):
    """
    Ensure that children of the placeholder ph are connected to the
    specified logger.
    """
    #for c in ph.loggers:
    for c in ph.loggerMap.keys():
        if string.find(c.parent.name, alogger.name) <> 0:
            alogger.parent = c.parent
            c.parent = alogger

This is either a really weird way of writing "if not c.parent.name.startswith(alogger.name):", or a bug which was intending to write "if alogger.name in c.parent.name:" .

I appreciate the criticism on the patch -- clearly it's not ready to go in, and more work needs to be put in to actually improve the code, using [r]partition() where necessary, etc. But I'm strenghtened in the conclusion that find() is way overused and we don't need yet another search primitive. TOOWTDI.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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