I come to praise .join, not to bury it...

[Alex Martelli]

"Steve Holden" <sholden at holdenweb.com> wrote in message
news:DNXo6.24266$1D5.975603 at e420r-atl1.usenetserver.com...
    [snip]
> > 2. Can we really join all kinds of lists?
> >
> No. I was somewhat startled to see that a UserList of integers could not
be
> given as an argument to join(). Relief of a kind arrived when I realised
> that the same was true of lists themselves.
    [snip]
> It would seem reasonable to expect the join() method to try and coerce
> things to lists, but maybe I'm not a reliable guide to what's reasonable.

It's not an issue of lists vs other stuff -- .join accepts as
its argument any sequence which defines a length, which is
reasonable (although it might be nice to remove that need for
the length being defined -- the sequence-length is only used
to control a for-loop, after all, so the test-for-IndexError
might suffice; but I guess unbounded-sequences might prove to
be a problem here).

The key issue, anyway, is with the _items_ in the sequence,
rather than with the sequence itself.  The join method on
a single-byte string wants each item to *BE* a single-byte
string -- peculiar behavior follows if it isn't, consider:

class Sequence:
    def __init__(self, N, value):
        self.N = N
        self.value = value
    def __len__(self):
        return self.N
    def __getitem__(self, index):
        if index>=self.N:
            raise IndexError, index
        return self.value

>>> sb=Sequence(3,'aa')
>>> 'x'.join(sb)
'aaxaaxaa'
>>> u'y'.join(sb)
u'aayaayaa'
>>> uc=Sequence(3,u'bbb')
>>> u'z'.join(uc)
u'bbbzbbbzbbb'
>>> 't'.join(uc)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, tuple found

and a Control-Z now crashes/hangs the Python interpreter (2.0, on
Win32).  OK, some kind of ugly bug in 2.0 (gotta get 2.1b1 and
check if the bug is still there...!!!).


Alex