Determining if a filename is greater than X characters

[Bengt Richter]

On Sun, 03 Aug 2003 02:45:31 GMT, "Cy Edmunds" <cedmunds at spamless.rochester.rr.com> wrote:

>"hokiegal99" <hokiegal99 at hotmail.com> wrote in message
>news:93f5c5e9.0308021815.44c57a2d at posting.google.com...
>> How would I determine if a filename is greater than a certain number
>> of characters and then truncate it to that number? For example a file
>> named XXXXXXXXX.txt would become XXXXXX
>>
>> fname = files
>> if fname[0] > 6
>>    print fname[0]
>>
>> Thanks!!!
>
>filename = "abcdefgh"
>if len(filename) > 6:
>    filename = filename[:6]
>print filename
>abcdef

Why the if test?

 >>> for filename in ['abcdefgh'[:i] for i in range(8)]:
 ...     print 'filename=%r gets you filename[:6] => %r' % (filename, filename[:6])
 ...
 filename='' gets you filename[:6] => ''
 filename='a' gets you filename[:6] => 'a'
 filename='ab' gets you filename[:6] => 'ab'
 filename='abc' gets you filename[:6] => 'abc'
 filename='abcd' gets you filename[:6] => 'abcd'
 filename='abcde' gets you filename[:6] => 'abcde'
 filename='abcdef' gets you filename[:6] => 'abcdef'
 filename='abcdefg' gets you filename[:6] => 'abcdef'

I wonder about the application of this for filenames though, since filenames
often share prefixes.

Regards,
Bengt Richter