Checking length of each argument - seems like I'm fighting Python

[Alex Martelli]

Brendan <spam4bsimons at yahoo.ca> wrote:
   ...
> def sLen(x):
>     """determines the number of items in x.
>     Returns 1 if x is a scalar. Returns 0 if x is None
>     """
>     xt = numeric.array(x)
>     if xt == None:
>         return 0
>     elif xt.rank == 0:
>         return 1
>     else:
>         return xt.shape[0]

Simpler:

def sLen(x):
    if x is None: return 0
    try: return len(x)
    except TypeError: return 1

Depending on how you define a "scalar", of course; in most applications,
a string is to be treated as a scalar, yet it responds to len(...), so
you'd have to specialcase it.


Alex