Operators as functions

[Anders Andersson]

Peter Hansen wrote:
> Anders Andersson wrote:
> 
>> I want to concatinate (I apologize for bad English, but it is not my 
>> native language) a list of strings to a string. I could use (I think):
>>
>> s = ""
>> map(lambda x: s.append(x), theList)
>>
>> But I want to do something like (I think that the code above is clumsy):
>>
>> s = reduce("concatinating function", theList, "")
>>
>> And here is the questions: What to replace "concatinating function" 
>> with? Can I in some way give the +-operator as an argument to the 
>> reduce function? I know operators can be sent as arguments in Haskell 
>> and since Python has functions as map, filter and listcomprehension 
>> etc. I hope it is possible in Python too. In Haskell I would write:
> 
> 
> You are looking for "import operator", followed by a use of
> operator.add in the reduce() call.  Note, however, that you
> cannot add different types (generally) together, so you will
> run into trouble if you take the "naive" approach and just
> trying concatenating the strings and the list as you show
> above.  Instead, you will need to pass the sequence of
> things through a call to map(str, sequence) first, to call
> the str() method on everything and make sure you are adding
> strings together.  Thus:
> 
> import operator
> s = reduce(operator.add, map(str, theList))
> 
> or something like that.
> 
> However, none of this is considered the best approach these days,
> with the advent of list comprehensions and generator expressions.
> Here's the old approach (shown above) and the shiny new modern
> Pythonic approach (requires Python 2.4):
> 
>  >>> theList = range(10)
>  >>> import operator
>  >>> reduce(operator.add, map(str, theList))
> '0123456789'
>  >>> ''.join(str(x) for x in theList)
> '0123456789'
> 
> -Peter

Thank you for replaying. The operator.add is new to me and I will keep 
it in mind. It will perhaps come to use. I will use the join function 
since it looks more beatiful!

-- 
Anders Andersson