I'm just curious on which of these methods is better (or if there's an even better one that I'm missing). I'm trying to determine if the first letter and last letter of a word are the same, and there are two obvious solutions to me.
if word[:1] == word[len(word)-1:]
or
if word[0] == word[len(word)-1]
As I understand it, the first is just pulling slices of the string and doing a string comparison, while the second is pulling the character from either end and comparing as bytes.
I'm curious if there's a performance difference between the two, and if there's any "preferable" way to do this?