[Python-Dev] (no subject) (original) (raw)

Alex Martelli aleax@aleax.it
Thu, 18 Apr 2002 17:24:04 +0200

On Thursday 18 April 2002 05:06 pm, Walter D�rwald wrote: ...

What's still missing is the version for unicode. Note that my patch http://www.python.org/sf/424606 works a little different: Here the argument is a complete word that should be stripped, not a collection of characters, i.e. your version: "oofoo".strip("foo") => "" my version: "oofoo".strip("foo") => "oo"

It seems to me that Guido's version is easier to teach, and more useful.

Easier to teach, because one can present this as the argument's "default value" being string.whitespace; more useful because I more often have strings to clean up that may end with arbitrary sequences of "junk" characters I want to remove, rather than with a potential specific "junk" word (and the latter case may be easier to handle with an .endswith test). Admittedly the specific use case which Guido recently mentioned (cleaning up, if present, the trailing 'L' from a number's repr) is handled just as well in either way, since it's only one character. But say e.g. I receive datagrams that may or may not end with trailing \r , \n, or \r\n -- .rstrip("\r\n") in Guido's version immediately solves my problem. I can't think of a similarly generic use-case for yours (perhaps a failure of imagination on my part).

Alex