Flexable Collating (feedback please)

[Ron Adam]

Thanks, But I fixed it already.  (almost)  ;-)

I think I will use strings as you suggest, and verify they are valid so a type 
don't go though silently.

I ended up using string based option list.  I agree a space separated string is 
better and easier from a user point of view.

The advantage of the list is it can be iterated without splitting first. But 
that's a minor thing.  self.options = options.lower().split(' ') fixes that easily.


Once I'm sure it's not going to get any major changes I'll post this as a 
recipe.  I think it's almost there.

Cheers and thanks,
    Ron



bearophileHUGS at lycos.com wrote:
> This part of code uses integer "constants" to be or-ed (or added):
> 
> CAPS_FIRST = 1
> NUMERICAL = 2
> HYPHEN_AS_SPACE = 4
> UNDERSCORE_AS_SPACE = 8
> IGNORE_LEADING_WS = 16
> COMMA_IN_NUMERALS = 32
> 
> ...
> 
> def __init__(self, flag):
>     self.flag = flag
> def transform(self, s):
>     """ Transform a string for collating.
>     """
>     if self.flag & CAPS_FIRST:
>         s = s.swapcase()
>     if self.flag & HYPHEN_AS_SPACE:
>         s = s.replace('-', ' ')
>     if self.flag & UNDERSCORE_AS_SPACE:
>         s = s.replace('_', ' ')
>     if self.flag & IGNORE_LEADING_WS:
>         s = s.strip()
>     if self.flag & NUMERICAL:
>         if self.flag & COMMA_IN_NUMERALS:
> 
> This is used in C, but maybe for Python other solutions may be better.
> I can see some different (untested) solutions:
> 
> 1)
> 
> def selfassign(self, locals):
>     # Code from web.py, modified.
>     for key, value in locals.iteritems():
>         if key != 'self':
>             setattr(self, key, value)
> 
> def __init__(self,
>              caps_first=False,
>              hyphen_as_space=False,
>              underscore_as_space=False,
>              ignore_leading_ws=False,
>              numerical=False,
>              comma_in_numerals=False):
>     selfassign(self, locals())
> 
> def transform(self, s):
>     if self.caps_first:
>         ...
> 
> Disadvangages: if a flag is added/modified, the code has to be modified
> in two places.
> 
> 
> 2)
> 
> def __init__(self, **kwds):
>     self.lflags = [k for k,v in kwds.items() if v]
> def transform(self, s):
>     if "caps_first" in self.lflags:
>         ...
> 
> This class can be created with 1 instead of Trues, to shorten the code.
> 
> Disadvantages: the user of this class has to read from the class
> doctring or from from the docs the list of possible flags (and such
> docs can be out of sync from the code).
> 
> 
> 3)
> 
> Tkinter (Tcl) shows that sometimes strings are better than int
> constants (like using "left" instead of tkinter.LEFT, etc), so this is
> another possibile solution:


I think maybe this is better, but I need to verify the flags so typos don't go 
though silently.



> def __init__(self, flags=""):
>     self.lflags = flags.lower().split()
> def transform(self, s):
>     if "caps_first" in self.lflags:
>         ...
> 
> An example of calling this class:
> 
> ... = Collate("caps_first  hyphen_as_space  numerical")
> 
> I like this third (nonstandard) solution enough.
> 
> Bye,
> bearophile
>