I feel stoopid ... this code is to verbose

[Eddie Corns]

Max M <maxm at mxm.dk> writes:

>Hmm ... I am working on a problem. In Danish we have a number format 
>that looks like:

>42.000.000,00 which is 42 millions

>def stringSlicer(string, chunkSize=3):
>     chunkList = []
>     reverseString = list(string)
>     reverseString.reverse()
>     for i in range(0, len(string), chunkSize):
>         chunk = reverseString[i:i+chunkSize]
>         chunk.reverse()
>         chunk = ''.join(chunk)
>         chunkList.append(chunk)
>     chunkList.reverse()
>     return '.'.join(chunkList)


>I just find that it's a lot of code for such a little function an it 
>annoys my sense of aestetics. I have tried a lot of different approaches 
>including using zip on a list like ['','','.'], and other weird stuff :-)

Recursion and remembering that you can avoid reverse by chopping off the tail
end.

My contribution:

def commas (n,span=3,sep='.'):
    def chop (x, acc=[]):
        if not x: return acc
        return chop (x[:-span], [x[-span:]]+acc)
    return sep.join(chop(str(n)))

I called it that because that's what the Icon command is called (and I misread
the post first time through - eyesight must be going).

Eddie