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Another Wart! string.find() [ was: namespace issue? ]

Michael Powe michael+gnus at trollope.org
Fri Jun 22 10:20:28 EDT 2001 
>>>>> "Steven" == Steven D Majewski <sdm7g at Virginia.EDU> writes:

    Steven> On 21 Jun 2001, Michael Powe wrote:

    >> So now the question is, 'why'?  Am I misusing the string.find()
    >> function? Okay, string.find() returns -1 when the string is not
    >> found, which would seem to be what I expected, a false result.
    >> Maybe python doesn't treat -1 as false?  Well, I'll try being
    >> explicit and testing for -1 return.  I probably have just
    >> confused myself hopelessly.

    Steven> You got it!

    Steven>   0, 0.0, "", [], (), and None, as well as classes that
    Steven> return 0 from methods __nonzero__ or __len__ are false.

    Steven>   everything else (unless I missed one ;-) is true.

    Steven>   -1 is true.

    Steven>   But find can't return 0 because it is a valid offset
    Steven> that signifies the beginning of a string, so it returns
    Steven> -1.

Yeah, I shoulda thunk.  I would have realized this.  ;-(

mp
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