> The statement that you want to test the truth of is s.find(q) >= 0. In
> other words, you want to see that the substring was found at a valid
> (non-negative) location. As someone else pointed out, it would make more
> sense to use None instead of -1.
I agree, that would be nice.
You still couldn't use `if s.find(q):` because you'd get a false result
> for a substring found at the beginning of the string, but the return value
> would make more intuitive sense.
I'm sorry, but is that so?
>>>None == 0
False
Since the start of the string is indicated by 0 and not None, that should
work, right?
Witness also the problem of actually using the result of find:
>
> s[s.find(q)]
>
> will yield a valid part of the string (the last character) when q is not
> found. If it evaluated to none, you'd get a respectable TypeError instead.
>
> But you still wouldn't--and never will--be able to say `if s.find(q)`,
> because valid array indices can be either true or false.
Yes, but that is the issue here. If the substring is not found, still find()
returns -1, which is a valid indice.
That I think is ugly. I can't think of a case where it would be prefereble
to have find() return -1 rather than None.
Formally speaking, -1 is an ambigious answer, since a perfectly valid
indice.
the '_'.find(' ') might actually make a nice idiom while parsing for
ignoring irrelevant lines, and processing lines that are of interest in the
conditional expression.
Cheers,
-jelle
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
