[DB-SIG] dBase III and VFP tables

[Carl Karsten]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 1:46 PM, Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:
> Carl Karsten wrote:
>>>
>>> Given this little example, would you still not worry about trailing
>>> whitespace?
>>
>>
>> Oh yeah, that.
>>
>> --> "abc   ".strip()
>> 'abc'
>>
>>  if rec.full_name.strip() == 'John Doe'
>>
>> Personally, I would leave it at that.
>>
>> half baked idea: If you want to add some code to hide that, add some
>> sort of auto-strip to the driver so it drops the extra spaces.
>
> Heh, that's what I've been doing.  It did two things for me: 1) made
> equality checking easier; and 2) made boolean checks make sense.  It has its
> own problems though -- mainly that single character empty fields don't work
> well:
>
> if rtyp in 'FMU': # is this Forwardable, Moved, or Undeliverable?
>
> ' ' gets stripped down to '', and '' is in every string, this doesn't work.

huh. yeah, its true.  i'm kinda surprised.

>>> '' in 'abc'
True

But this works:
>>> '' in ['a','b','c']
False
>>> 'b' in ['a','b','c']
True


>
> And yes, I could use a .strip() every time I have a field comparison, but I
> have *lots* of them in my code, and it feels an awful lot like unnecessary
> boiler plate.

I know what you mean.

My advice:

2 wads of code: the dbapi module and some wrapper to make it nicer to work with.

>
> Okay, I'll leave the default at str, and make Char, like Date, DateTime, and
> Logical, be available options.
>
> ~Ethan~
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-- 
Carl K