Stepping backwards in for loop?

[Carlos Ribeiro]

At 14:10 14/04/01 +0000, Gustaf Liljegren wrote:
>Can't figure out how to step backwards, character by character in a string.
>I was looking for a loop countruct with a counter to handle this, but the
>for loop in Python doesn't let me step backwards. What is the alternative?

 >>> a = 'abcde'
 >>> b = list(a)
 >>> b.reverse()
 >>> b
['e', 'd', 'c', 'b', 'a']


It would be a *lot* easier if strings had a reverse method, or if the 
reverse() methods returned the reversed string. However, similarly to 
sort(), the Python-way-of-doing-things must have some good reason for 
reverse() to behave this way (as a inplace operation on the list).


Carlos Ribeiro