why not "'in' in 'in'"?
Erik Max Francis
max at alcyone.com
Wed Jun 12 22:33:38 EDT 2002
Grant Griffin wrote:
> So why is the "in" operator limited to single characters when used as
> a
> membership operator? This peculiar lack of generality seems a bit
> (dare I say
> it?) "non-Pythonic".
On the contrary, it is exquisitely Pythonic. You used the magic word
yourself: _membership_. A string is a sequence of characters, so when
testing membership with the `in' operator, the left-hand side of the
expression should be a character (really a string of length one). `in'
tests membership, not for the existence of subsequences. Would you have
expected
[1, 2] in [1, 2, 3, 4]
to evaluate to true?
--
Erik Max Francis / max at alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
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