>> Maybe string.ato[if] used to behave that way? John> Nope. ...
OK, I remember what it was. The C atof()/atoi() functions will stop at the first non-numeric character. (I believe the more modern strtod/strtof functions behave the same way.) You could thus call atof(" 12345 abcdef") and get back 12345. That I'm certain is an error in Python. Somewhere in my small walnut of a brain I must have conflated that with numeric strings which contain extraneous whitespace but no other extra characters. Skip -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list