On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 4:48 AM, Kent Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The docs say, "If radix is zero, the proper radix is guessed based on
> the contents of string; the interpretation is the same as for integer
> literals."
>
> 'guessed' is not really a very good choice of words; 'determined'
> might be better. The last part of the sentence is the clue.
>
You're right - if it had said "determined", I would have thought to insert a
"0x" at the beginning of my test string.
Since it said "guessed", it didn't occur to me to do that, with the
following result:
>> int("FF", 0)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<input>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 0: 'FF'
which seemed to say to me that the function is trying to interpret the
string as base 0: what the heck would that mean, anyway? Is that not just a
particularly elaborate version of division by zero?
I had written a short passage reviling this as a useless feature, when it
struck me that there actually is a use case for it: if you're parsing a text
file (or perhaps the Windows registry?) full of numeric values in arbitrary
encodings. You know - on one line there's a value expressed in decimal,
then something in octal, something in binary, something in hex. If I ever
run into a file like that - and so far I never have - I won't have to write
a custom parser. Hurrah!
--
www.fsrtechnologies.com
_______________________________________________
Tutor maillist - [email protected]
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
