else in list comp

[Cliff Wells]

Maybe this has come up before, but I haven't heard a discussion of list
comps in a while so here's something I thought might be interesting:

I was looking for a fast, clean way of converting a single value in a
list to a different value (specifically None to '').  It occurred to me
to use a list comp and this seemed the most straightforward solution:

Given the list:

l = ['mary', 'had', 'a', 'little', None]

it should get mapped to ['mary', 'had', 'a', 'little', '']

What I thought of first:

['' for i in l if i is None else i]

Now clearly this isn't valid Python code, but it seemed natural.  The
working solution I actually used is:

[[i, ''][i is None] for i in l]

which doesn't seem nearly as nice, and likely less efficient (due to the
additional list lookup) than the non-existent alternative.

Any thoughts on something like this?  Has this come up before (I'm not
sure exactly how I'd Google for this) and been rejected?


-- 
Cliff Wells <clifford.wells at attbi.com>