Question

In a single character string when I try to fetch second character python fails quite verbosely which is correct and expected behavior.

print 'a'[1]

However when I try to fetch an invalid sub sequence range, it fails silently.

print 'a'[1:]

What is the reason for the difference in behavior?

Answer 1

actually slicing never generates any error in case of strings and lists:

for eg.

>>> s='abc'
>>> s[-1000:1000]
'abc'

works fine.

On the other hand, while accesing Indexes that are not defined will always raise an IndexError in both strings and lists:

>>> s[4]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#6>", line 1, in <module>
    s[4]
IndexError: string index out of range