On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 12:36 PM, Raymond Hettinger
[AMK]
Has any consideration been given to removing some of the lesser-used string methods in 3.0? e.g. .center, .ljust/rjust, .zfill, .swapcase?
I don't think we gain anything by taking justification and centering methods away. It just makes life difficult for people like me who use those methods for formatting text. Also, these methods have nearly zero mental overhead -- they are self-explanatory and have no learning curve.
The swapcase() method is more use case challenged and could probably be zapped without anyone caring.
The zfill() method is no longer necessary because rjust() takes an optional fillchar argument:
'123'.zfill(10) == '123'.rjust(10, '0')
Ah cool! I don't think I knew about that because I always knew about zfill(). Probably would have found it if I zfill() didn't exist. So for Python 3.1 we can probably safely ditch the two methods (and probably review the methods on the other types as well). -Brett