One of the students in my class at the Space Telescope Science Institute ("Hubble R Us") last week brought up an interesting point: if "abbc"[-1] is "c", and if "abbc".replace("b", "x", 1) is "axbc", then shouldn't "abbc".replace("b", "x", -1) be "abxc" (i.e. negative numbers replace the *last* occurrences of the value)? Same argument for "split", etc. Turns out that "abbc".replace("b", "x", -1) is "axxc" (i.e. negative arguments are ignored). I would have expected this to raise a ValueError, if anything. Is there a reason for this behavior? Is it worth making replace, split, etc. interpret negative indices in the same way as indexing does? Thanks, Greg
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