[Python-Dev] Let's stop eating exceptions in dict lookup

[Fredrik Lundh]

Guido van Rossum wrote:

>>> well, the empty string is a valid substring of all possible strings
>>> (there are no "null" strings in Python).  you get the same behaviour
>>> from slicing, the "in" operator, "replace" (this was discussed on the
>>> list last week), "count", etc.
 >
>> Although Tim pointed out that replace() only regards
>> n+1 empty strings as existing in a string of lenth
>> n. So for consistency, find() should only find them
>> in those places, too.

depends on how you interpret the reference to "slices" in the docs. 
"abc"[100:] is an empty string, and so is "abc"[100:100].

> And "abc".count("") should return 4.

it does, and has always done (afaik).  "abc".count("", 100) did use to 
return -96, though, which is hard to explain in terms of anything else.

</F>