[Tutor] I'm puzzled

[Vincent Zee]

On Sunday, 22 January 2006 at 18:11:09 -0600, Hugo González Monteverde wrote:
> Hi Vincent,
> 
> > the program works with any input except when you just hit the enter key.
> 
> 
> To be  able to understand why is the crash, take a look at what the 
> interpreter tells you:
> 
>  >  File "untitled.py", line 12, in ?
>  >    elif a[0] == '-' and a[1:].isdigit():
>  > IndexError: string index out of range
> 
> IndexError is raised whan you try to access an element in a list or 
> string, an element that does not exist. In the case where you only press 
> enter, what is the content of a???? How many characters? (hint, you may 
> try to
> 
Hi Hugo,

thank you for your reply.
What confused me was the fact that the isdigit method didn't complain
about the empty string, so I assumed that indexing an empty string
wouldn't be a problem (:-))

But now I think of it that wouldn't be logical.
Sometimes the 'intelligence' of python makes me lazy (;-))

/\
Vincent