How do I get a slice of a string held in a tuple?

[Georg Brandl]

Lorenzo schrieb:

>> > How do I go about it?
>> 
>> Do it correctly. Post your actual example that fails
>> and the related error message. Possibnly your indexes
>> were out of range.
>> 
>> > I googled this and found a couple
>> > of references, but no solution.
>> 
>> Well, there wouldn't be  a solution to a non-existent
>> problem, would there?
>> 
>> > TIA
> 
> Here's the code:
> 
>  elapsedTime = mydata[1]
>  index = elapsedTime.find("real")
>  # the index will have a value 0f 110 
>  totaltime = elapsedTime[index:]
>  # instead of this returning a shortened html string, i only 
>  # get the left angle bracket '<'

May it be that mydata[1] doesn't contain "real" at all? In that case,
find() returns -1, and the slice elapsedTime[-1:] always contains
at most one character.

If you replace "find" by "index", you get a ValueError exception if
"real" was not found, if that helps you.

Whenever one calls str.find(), one has to check the return value for -1.

Georg