Best way to split up lines - RE: About the 79 character linerecommendation

[John Machin]

Roy Smith wrote:

> It would be nice if struct.unpack() had a way to specify unpacking repeated
> items as a list, ie:
>
>    data = struct.unpack ("! H 4(B) H 2B 12(B) 6(B) H I", strMessage)
>    (top,
>     ip,
>     messageCounter,
>     ackRequired,
>     dataType,
>     utc,
>     st,
>     numberOfLables,
>     dataWord) = data
>
> and you'd end up with ip, utc, and st being lists.

:-)
Extension: if you used [] in the format string, the results would be
tuples.
:-)

>  Hmmm, maybe that's
> worth a PEP?

Great minds think more-or-less alike :-)

All we need now is for the populace to vote on "least fugly syntax".
Yours has the advantage over mine that it would handle (say) 10(4s)
*if* anybody ever wanted to do that, but the ")" is a redundant
nuisance.

Mine could be changed so that the "/" is between the count and the
format code, so that 10/4s would work ... hmmm there are actually 3
different numbers: an overall repeat count, a tuple/list length, and a
field width. The current syntax uses the one number as a field width
for "s" and as a repeat count for other format codes. Ugh.

BTW the only reason I picked "/" was it doesn't need the Shift key :-)

Cheers,
John