Implicit lists

[Donnal Walter]

"Alex Martelli" wrote:
> Dale Strickland-Clark wrote:
>
> > In many places, often small utility functions, I find myself using the
> > form:
> >
> > lst = maybeAnArg
> > if type(lst) not in (list, tuple)
> >     lst = [lst]
> > for x in lst:
> >     whatever
> >
> > or
> >
> > lst = maybeAnArg
> > if type(lst) not in (list, tuple)
> >     lst = [lst]
> > mangle = [x for x in lst if whatever]
> >
> >
> > In other words, I want to be able to treat an argument of arbitrary
> > type as a list of 1 if it isn't already a list.
> >
> > Has anyone got a neater way of doing this?
>
> Sure:
>
> for x in aslist(list):
>     whatever(x)
>
>
> How aslist is written is obviously quite secondary (at least,
> I _hope_ that's obvious...) -- all of its USES will be just as
> neat as the above example.
> ...

I have followed this thread with interest because I need the same kind of
functionality. The iteron definition using generators doesn't really work
for me for some reason. (I confess I don't fully understand generators.) I
would settle for a function aslist that would meet the following unit tests:

class MyObject(object): pass

class test_aslist(unittest.TestCase):

    def test_string(self):
        x = 'spam'            # arg
        y = aslist(x)         # test function
        z = [x]               # target
        self.assertEquals(y, z)

    def test_tuple(self):
        x = ('spam', 'eggs')  # arg
        y = aslist(x)         # test function
        z = ['spam', 'eggs']  # target
        self.assertEquals(y, z)

    def test_list(self):
        x = ['spam', 'eggs']  # arg
        y = aslist(x)         # test function
        z = x                 # target
        self.assertEquals(y, z)

    def test_instance(self):
        x = MyObject()        # arg
        y = aslist(x)         # test function
        z = [x]               # target
        self.assertEquals(y, z)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    unittest.main()

Thanks.

Donnal Walter
Arkansas Children's Hospital