On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Calvin Spealman <ironfroggy@gmail.com> wrote:
This might be a silly idea, but I was wondering about forcing split() to return at least X number of items. For example, I might be getting a comma separated string and i want to split it up into names, but I might have less than all of them. If it is just 0, 1, or 2, I can use partition(), but any more and that doesn't work. Besides, I don't care if the separator is there, just to get the values. Might also make sense to give the values to give by default.
Example of implementing this:
def split(self, sep=None, max_splits=None, min_items=None): parts = self.split(sep, max_splits) if len(parts) < min_items: parts.extend([None] * (min_items - len(parts))) return parts
Use would be like this:
a, b, c, d = "1,2,3".split(',', None, 4)
Probably not a great idea, but I'm tossing it out there, anyway.
Doesn't strike me as easy to use; the None values returned would most likely cause a traceback a few lines down. Returning '' might be better, but I still think it's very marginal functionality and makes the API ugly due to the large number of optional arguments. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)