Do pythons like sugar?

[Andrew Dalke]

Afanasiy wrote:
> I've written this method for a text formatting class...
> But it's ugly as sin. With all those self's I consider
> it much less readable than it could be...
   ...
> Does Python? eg. `with self do:`
> 
>   def format( self, width=80 ):    
>     self.lines = ['']
>     i = 0
>     for word in self.text.split():  
>       if self.textwidth(self.lines[i]) + self.textwidth(word) <= width:
>         if self.textwidth(self.lines[i]) > 0:
>           self.lines[i] += ' '
>         self.lines[i] += word
>       else:
>         i += 1
>         self.lines.append(word)
> 

Do you really need all those self references?  This looks like it should
be a function, as in

def format(text, width = 80):
   lines = []
   line = ''
   for word in text.split():
     if len(line) + len(word) <= width:
       if line:
         line += ' '
       line += word
     else:
       if not line:
         raise TypeError("The word %r is more than %d colums!" % \
                            (word, width))
       lines.append(line)
       line = ''
   return lines

class ...
     def ...
         self.lines = format(text, 132)

(Note -- I'm using 'len' instead of your 'self.textwidth'.  You
could pass in the length function as a parameter if you want.)

If using Python 2.3, see the 'textwrap' module.

					Andrew
					dalke at dalkescientific.com