[email protected] wrote:
Is there a built-in method in python that lets you specify a "default" value that will be returned whenever you try to access a list item that is out of bounds? Basically, it would be a function like this:def item(x,index,default): try: return x[index] except IndexError: return default So if a=[0,1,2,3], then item(a,0,44)=0, item(a,1,44)=1, and item(a, 1000,44)=44, item(a,-1000,44)=44 What I want to know is whether there is a built-in method or notation for this.
> There's no built-in method or notation for that. > What if, for example, we could do something like a [1000,44] ? That's actually using a tuple (1000, 44) as the index. Such tuples can be used as keys in a dict and are used in numpy for indexing multi-dimensional arrays, so it's definitely a bad idea. If such a method were added to the 'list' class then the best option (ie most consistent with other classes) would be get(index, default=None). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
