[Python-ideas] Deprecate str.find

Sat Jul 16 00:50:50 CEST 2011

On 15Jul2011 12:12, Mike Graham <mikegraham at gmail.com> wrote:
| On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 10:57 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
| > However, in many cases absence of the string is not an error -- you
| > just need to do something else. [...]
|| It isn't necessarily an error if the substring is not in the string
| (though it sometimes is), but it is an exceptional case.

No it isn't, IMO. It's simply the _other_ case.
| Python uses
| exceptions pretty liberally most places -- it isn't necessarily an
| error if an iterator is exhausted or if float("4.2 bad user input") is
| called or if BdbQuit was raised. In these cases, an exception can be
| perfectly expected to indicate that what happened is different from
| the information used in a return value.

In all the cases you cite the exception indicates failure of the
operation: .next() has nothing to "next" to, float is being handed
garbage etc.
str.find does not have a failure mode, it has string found and string
not found.
| Making a Python user write a try/except block when she wants to handle
| both the cases "substring is in s" and "substring isn't in s" seems
| perfectly fine to me and, really, preferable to the if statement
| required to handle these two cases.

You don't find try/except wordy and opaque? I find "if" more idiomatic
most of the time.
Not to mention vague: it can often be quite hard to be sure the raised
exception came from just the operation you imagine it came from. With
str.find there's little scope for vagueness I agree (unless you aren't
really using a str, but a duck-type). But plenty of:
 try:
 x = foofunc(y)
 except IndexError, e:
 ...
is subject to uncaught IndexError arbitrarily deep in foofunc's call
stack.
| The base two cases really are about the same:
[... try ... excpt ...]
| vs.
|| i = s.find(sub)
| if i == -1:
| do_something()
|| But what if I forgot to handle the special case? [...]
| In this second case, I get the value of -1. Later I can use it as an
| index, use it in a slice, or perform arithmetic on it. This can
| introduce seemingly-unrelated values later on, making this especially
| hard to track down.

I agree it may be a pity that str.find doesn't return None on string not
found, which would generally raise an exception on an attempt to use it
as a number.
Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/
Any company large enough to have a research lab
is large enough not to listen to it. - Alan Kay