How good is startswith?

Question

Is

text.startswith(\'a\')  

better than

text[0]==\'a\'  

?

Knowing text is not empty and we a

Answer 1

Personally I would say startswith is more readable.

Also, from Python 2.5 startwith can take a tuple of prefixes to look for:

>>> "hello world".startswith(("hello","goodbye"))
True