Filtering out non-readable characters

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 16 Jul 2005 19:01:50 -0400, Peter Hansen wrote:

> George Sakkis wrote:
>> "Bengt Richter" <bokr at oz.net> wrote:
>>> >>> identity = ''.join([chr(i) for i in xrange(256)])
>> 
>> Or equivalently:
>>>>>identity = string.maketrans('','')
> 
> Wow!  That's handy, not to mention undocumented.  (At least in the 
> string module docs.)  Where did you learn that, George?

I can't answer for George, but I also noticed that behaviour. I discovered
it by trial and error. I thought, oh what a nuisance that the arguments
for maketrans had to include all 256 characters, then I wondered what
error you would get if you left some out, and discovered that you didn't
get an error at all.

That actually disappointed me at the time, because I was looking for
behaviour where the missing characters weren't filled in, but I've come to
appreciate it since.


-- 
Steven