[Python-Dev] String methods... finally

[M.-A. Lemburg]

David Ascher wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 11 Jun 1999, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 
> > Perhaps join() ought to be a built-in function?
> 
> Would it do the moral equivalent of a reduce(operator.add, ...) or of a
> string.join?
> 
> I think it should do the former (otherwise something about 'string' should
> be in the name), and as a consequence I think it shouldn't have the
> default whitespace spacer.

AFAIK, Guido himself proposed something like this on c.l.p a
few months ago. I think something like the following written
in C and optimized for lists of strings might be useful:

def join(sequence,sep=None):

    x = sequence[0]
    if sep:
	for y in sequence[1:]:
	    x = x + sep + y
    else:
	for y in sequence[1:]:
	    x = x + y
    return x

>>> join(('a','b'))
'ab'
>>> join(('a','b'),' ')
'a b'
>>> join((1,2,3),3)
12
>>> join(((1,2),(3,)))
(1, 2, 3)

Also, while we're at string functions/methods. Some of the stuff
in mxTextTools (see Python Pages link below) might be of general
use as well, e.g. splitat(), splitlines() and charsplit().

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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