On 27 October 2016 at 00:17, Chris Barker
I"ve lost track of what (If anything) is actually being proposed here... so I"m going to try a quick summary:
1) an easy way to spell "remove all the characters other than these"
I think that's a good idea. What with unicode having an enormous number of code points, it really does make sense to have a way to specify only what you want, rather than what you don't want.
Back in the good old days of 1-byte chars, it wasn't hard to build up a full 256 element translate table -- not so much anymore. And one of the whole points of str.translate() is good performance.
a) a new method:
str.remove_all_but(sequence_of_chars) (naming TBD)
b) a new flag in translate (Kind of like the decode keywords)
str.translate(table, missing='ignore'|'remove')
(b) has the advantage of adding translation and removal in one fell swoop -- but if you only want to remove, then you have to make a translation table of 1:1 mappings = not hard, but a annoying:
Exactly that is the proposal. And for same exact reason that you point out, I also can't give a comment what would be better. It would be indeed quite strange from syntactical POV if I just want to remove "all except" and must call translate(). So ideally both should exist I think. Mikhail