Liam Clarke wrote: > And, a question for the group, I've always found that line[:1] is a > complicated way of writing line[0]... is there any time when line[:1] > != line[0]?
Actually I would say that the general case is for them to be different and in the special case where line is a string they are the same. line[0] means, "the first element of the sequence line" line[:1] means, "the sequence consisting of everything from the start of line up to (but not including) line[1]" If line is a list, these two meanings are different: >>> r=range(4) >>> r [0, 1, 2, 3] >>> r[0] 0 >>> r[:1] [0] In the case of a string, line[0] is actually a sequence itself - a new string. This is kind of strange, really, that an element of a sequence can be the same as a subsequence of the sequence. It is a consequence of Python not having a character type - single characters are represented as strings. Kent -- http://www.kentsjohnson.com _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
