A specific example of my question is, "How can I get '3210' in this example?" >>> foo = '0123456' >>> foo[0:4] '0123' >>> foo[::-1] '6543210' >>> foo[4:0:-1] # I was shooting for '3210' but made a fencepost error, that's fine, but... '4321' >>> foo[3:-1:-1] # How can I get '3210'? '' >>> foo[3:0:-1] '321' It seems strange that I can write foo[4:0:-1], foo[5:1:-1], etc. and get what I would expect, but there's no way to write the slice so that I get '3210'. A makeshift way of doing this would be foo[0:4][::-1], but this creates two string objects in the process. I will be performing this operation literally billions of times, so every string operation is expensive. I must be missing something silly and easy. Thanks for your help! Continue reading...
