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Slicing vs .startswith

David Eppstein eppstein at ics.uci.edu
Mon Sep 22 19:35:39 EDT 2003 
In article <3F6F8306.1ABCC6D at engcorp.com>,
 Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:

> Paul wrote:
> > 
> > However, what if you don't want case sensitivity?  For example, to
> > check if a file is a jpg, I do name[-3:].lower() == 'jpg'.  This will
> > work with both foo.jpg and foo.JPG.
> > 
> > Is this slower than name.lower().endswith('jpg')?  Is there a better
> > solution altogether?
> 
> Yes, of course. :-)
> 
> import os
> if os.path.splitext(name)[1].lower() == 'jpg':
>     pass
> 
> That also handles the problem with files named "ThisFileIs.NotAjpg" 
> being mistreated, as the other solutions do. ;-)

I was about to post the same answer.  One minor nit, though: it should be

os.path.splitext(name)[1].lower() == '.jpg'

It may be a little longer than the other solutions, but it expresses the 
meaning more clearly.

-- 
David Eppstein                      http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/
Univ. of California, Irvine, School of Information & Computer Science
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