[Python-Dev] Adding any() and all()

[Alex Martelli]

On Mar 11, 2005, at 18:18, Raymond Hettinger wrote:

> str.join() is still the best practice for string concatenation.

...except you actually need unicode.join if the strings are of that 
kind.  Fortunately, ''.join intrinsically compensates:

 >>> x=[u'\u0fe0']*2
 >>> ''.join(x)
u'\u0fe0\u0fe0'

*without* (as one would expect) the GD nuisance of converting x's items 
to str (hellishly hard to document accurately and clearly, but 
extremely convenient!-).

Which reminds me -- could we have a methodcaller relative to attrgetter 
and itemgetter?  "Sort a list of strings in a case-insensitive way" 
would become *SO* easy with sort(dalist, key=methodcaller('lower'))... 
can't REALLY recommend sort(dalist, key=str.lower) then the items of 
dalist MIGHT be either str or unicode items... (the relevance of 
''.join is that it proves SOMEbody considered it important to deal with 
a list of either str or unicode in the joining context... why not in 
the sorting context then?).


Alex