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From: Neil Cerutti <neilc@norwich.edu>
Subject: Re: A curious bit of code...
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 19:25:27 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: Norwich University
References: <4cc09129-43ee-4205-a24c-03f92b594abc@googlegroups.com> <ldj59s$iip$1@ger.gmane.org> <52FD1B01.80200@stoneleaf.us>
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On 2014-02-13, Ethan Furman <ethan@stoneleaf.us> wrote:
> On 02/13/2014 11:09 AM, Mark Lawrence wrote:
>> All I can say is that if you're worried about the speed of a
>> single line of code like the above then you've got problems.
>> Having said that, I suspect that using an index to extract a
>> single character has to be faster than using a slice, but I
>> haven't run these through a profiler yet :)
>
> The problem with using indices in the code sample is that if
> the string is 0 or 1 characters long you'll get an exception
> instead of a False.

There will be an exception only if it is zero-length. But good
point! That's a pretty sneaky way to avoid checking for a
zero-length string. Is it a popular idiom?

-- 
Neil Cerutti