[Python-ideas] oneof() and multi split and replace for stirngs

[Ron Adam]

Calvin Spealman wrote:
> I don't know if this would make sense to try to push to 2.6 or 3.0. I
> was talking with some people about how the ability to split or replace
> on multiple substrings would be added to python, without adding new
> methods or having ugly tuple passing requirents like s.split(('foo',
> 'bar'), 4). This idea came to mind, so I wanted to toss it out there
> for scrutination. It would be a builtin, but can be implemented in
> python like this, basically:
> 
> class oneof(list):
>     def __init__(self, *args):
>         list.__init__(self)
>         self.extend(args)
>     def __eq__(self, o):
>         return o in self
> 
> assert 'bar' == oneof('bar', 'baz')

          'bar' in 'bar baz'  ?



> In addition to the new type, .replace, .split, and other appropriate
> functions would be updated to take this as the substring argument to
> locate and would match any one of the substrings it contains. I've
> asked a few people and gotten good responses on the general idea so
> far, but what do you all think?

> 1) Would the multi-substring operations be welcomed?
> 2) Could this be a good way to add those to the API without breaking things?
> 3) What version would it target?
> 4) What all functions and methods should support this or generally
> might gain value from some similar solution?

It doesn't feel right to me to have this as a built in.  This falls in the 
category of mid level functionality, but I'm never sure where to draw the line 
between having simple objects to do more complex things on, vs more complex 
objects.  I tend to prefer the first case.

Having more functions to do more complex, but common, things to strings and 
lists of strings would be nice to have in the library.

Examples of this are fnmatch.py, and textwrap.py.  These both use re to do the 
work, but present an easier to use interface.

The functions in textwrap could be extended to accept 'lists of lines'. And 
functions to do justifying, right and full, might also be useful.

Having a simpler word matching alternative to do web style multi term searches 
on lists of strings, would be nice.  (Something I could use to handle search 
requests right now.)  It could be designed to be presentable to users like 
fnmatch.  The simpler pattern matching would work in many programming situations 
as well.  Like fnmatch, and textwrap, it would use re to do the actual work.

Functions like split_pattern(), replace_pattern(), and partition_pattern() could 
also be available in the same module to handle the cases you suggested.

Cheers,
   Ron