Question

I just discovered the py3k range method count():

counts = range(start, stop, step).count(item)

Is not the result of the method always 1 or 0 ?. It seems to me a bit overkilling to call the method count (instead of maybe contains).

Is there something in this method that makes it different to the good old:

if item in range(start, stop, step)  ?

Answer 1

range.count() indeed always returns 0 or 1, and it’s the same as int(item in range(...)). Its main purpose is to make the interface of range() objects comply with the interface of a collections.abc.Sequence, which requires a count() method.

Note that issubclass(range, collections.abc.Sequence) returns True.