Quick question on Arrays

Parker911

I may be misunderstanding this but in the documentation for Arrays it states "Negative indices can be used to count from the back, like in Python (-1 is the last element" Then under the find method it states "Searches the array for a value and returns its index or -1 if not found" So it returns the last item in the array if not found? Other than writing a statement to rule out a -1 result how do you all get around this, or have I read it wrong?

Erich_L

I think the point is that if you're searching for a item in an array, it's never going to give you a negative value if it actually found it. It's going to give you -1 if it wasn't found which is the same as all the other languages I know.

So just remember if result == -1: # object not found

So don't take that result to mean the item was found as the last index of the array. That'll never be the case. If it found it at the last place it'll just give the last index (positive value)

Parker911

Thanks for your help Erich, so if I have a statement which reads array1[array1.find ("item1",0)] = "item2"

Then it seems that if item1 doesnt exist it just replaces the last item in the array with item2, which is obviously not wanted. My way round this is to put a while or if statement to ignore -1, I dont know if there is a better way

DaveTheCoder

That's correct. You have to handle find() == -1 as a special case.