It's common to want to clip (or clamp) a number to a range. This feature is commonly needed for both floating point numbers and integers:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9775731/clamping-floating-numbers-in-python

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4092528/how-to-clamp-an-integer-to-some-range-in-python

There are a few approaches:

* use a couple ternary operators (e.g. https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/5944/files line 98, which generated a lot of discussion)

* use a min/max construction,

* call sorted on a list of the three numbers and pick out the first, or

* use numpy.clip.

Am I right that there is no *obvious* way to do this? If so, I suggest adding math.clip (or math.clamp) to the standard library that has the meaning:

def clip(number, lower, upper):

return lower if number < lower else upper if number > upper else number

This would work for non-numeric types so long as the non-numeric types support comparison. It might also be worth adding

assert lower < upper

to catch some bugs.

Best,

Neil