[Python-ideas] More user-friendly version for string.translate()

[Chris Barker]

my thought on this:

If you need translate() you probably can write the code to parse a text
file, and then you can use whatever format you want.

This seems a very special case to build into the stdlib.

-CHB




On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 10:39 AM, Mikhail V <mikhailwas at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I would be happy to see a somewhat more general and user friendly
> version of string.translate function.
> It could work this way:
> string.newtranslate(file_with_table, Drop=True, Dec=True)
>
> So the parameters:
>
> 1. "file_with_table" : a text file with table in following format:
>
> #[In]    [Out]
>
> 97    {65}
> 98    {66}
> 99    {67}
> 100    {}
> ...
> 110    {110}
>
>
> Notes:
> All values are decimal or hex (to switch between parsing format use
> Dec parameter)
> As it turned out from my last discussion, majority prefers hex notation,
> so I am not in mainstream with my decimal notation here, but both
> should be supported.
> Empty [Out] value {} means that the character will be deleted.
>
> 2. "Drop = True" this will set the default behavior for those values
> which are NOT in the table.
>
> For Drop = True: all values not defined in table set to [out] = {},
> and be deleted.
>
> For Drop=False: all values not defined in table set [out] = [in], so
> those remain as is.
>
> 3. Dec= True : parsing format Decimal/hex. I use decimal everywhere.
>
>
> Further thoughts: for 8-bit strings this should be simple to implement
> I think. For 16-bit of course
> there is issue of memory usage for lookup tables, but the gurus could
> probably optimise it.
> E.g. at the parsing stage it is not necessary to build the lookup
> table  for whole 16-bit range of course,
> but take only values till the largest ordinal present in the table file.
>
> About the format of table file: I suppose many users would want also
> to define characters directly, I am not sure
> if it is really needed, but if so, additional brackets or escape char
> could be used, like this for example:
>
> a    {A}
> \98    {\66}
> \99    {\67}
>
> but as said I don't like very much the idea and would be OK for me to
> use numeric values only.
>
> So approximately I see it.
> Feel free to share thoughts or criticise.
>
>
> Mikhail
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