find nth occurance in a string?

[Alex Martelli]

"Greg Goodman" <chironsw at swbell.net> wrote in message
news:3C44E3DC.1E91D934 at swbell.net...
>
> >         pieces = theString.split(searchString, n)
> >         if len(pieces) != n+1: return -1
> >         return len(TheString)-len(pieces[n])+len(searchString)
>
> That's a neat trick; I like it.  Coming from a 'C' background, my string
> processing is usually low-level and brute force.  Snippets like this are
> helping me to learn Pythonic idiom as well as to think about string
> manipulation differently.
>
> Just to show I'm paying attention, I think the last line should be:
>
> return len(TheString)-(len(pieces[n])+len(searchString))

Ooops, yes, it should -- or, the + in the return statement should
be changed into a -.  Now let's see if I can pull off a claim
that I had deliberately inserted this buglet to
    [a] check who was paying attention and/or
    [b] subliminally advertise for test-first coding...


Alex