[George Sakkis] > It's only obvious in the sense that _after_ you see this idiom, you can go > back to the docs and > realize it's not doing something special; OTOH if you haven't seen it, it's > not at all the obvious > solution to "how do I get the first 256 characters". So IMO it should be > mentioned, given that > string.translate often operates on the identity table. I think a single > sentence is adequate for the > reference docs.
For Py2.5, I've accepted a feature request to allow string.translate's first argument to be None and then run as if an identity string had been provided. Raymond Hettinger -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list