[Python-Dev] Iterable String Redux (aka String ABC) (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Tue May 27 23:59:25 CEST 2008

Georg Brandl <g.brandl gmx.net> writes:

You wrote:

> If we stay minimalistic we could consider that the three basic operations that > define a string are: > - testing for substring containment > - splitting on a substring into a list of substrings > - slicing in order to extract a substring I argued that instead of split, find belongs into that list. (BTW, length inquiry would be a fourth.)

Well, find() does test for substring containment, so in essence it is in that list, although in my first post I chose 'contains' as the canonical representative of substring containment :-) And, you are right, length inquiry belongs into it too.

That the other methods, among them split, can be implemented in terms of those, follows from both sets of basic operations.

When I wrote "the three basic operations that define a string", perhaps I should have written "the three essential operations" instead. I was not attempting to give implementation guidelines but to propose a semantic definition of what constitutes a string and distinguishes it from other kinds of objects.

Anyway, I think we are picking on words here.

Do we agree on the following basic String interface : ['len', 'contains', 'getitem', 'find', 'index', 'split', 'rsplit']?

cheers

Antoine.

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list