Pythonic idioms / Programming Puzzle

[Anton Vredegoor]

On 19 Jan 2002 13:51:51 GMT, ameoba <ahmebah at hotmail.com> wrote:

>Looking at these two fundamentally different solutions to the same problem 
>got me thinking...  Obviously, both of these solutions are correct and 
>fully functional, but is one a more Pythonic way of solving the problem, or 
>is there an even more Pythonic solution floating arround?

[Based also on parts of the code of the previous posters]
This is the way I would do it:

"""
    indexed menuchoice based on a list of a list of possible items
"""

from operator import mul

class MenuChoice:
    
    def __init__(self,menulist):
        self.maxindex = reduce(mul,map(len, menulist)) - 1
        self.menulist = menulist

    def __getitem__(self, index):
        res = []
        counter = index
        if index > self.maxindex:
            raise IndexError, "No %ith menu avalable"
        else:
            for  items in self.menulist:
                nitems = len(items)
                res.append(items[ counter % nitems])
                counter /= nitems
        res.reverse
        return res
                
def test():
    menudata = [["Small","Medium","Large"],
        ["Mountain Dew", "root beer", "orange juice"],
        ["\b, a"],
        ["hamburger", "cheeseburger", "double cheeseburger"],
        ["\b, and a"],
        ["small", "medium", "large"],
        ["fries."]]
    menus = MenuChoice(menudata)
    for menu in menus:
        print " ".join(menu)

if __name__=='__main__':
    test()