Newbie question - better way to do this?

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Sun, 27 May 2007 10:44:01 -0300, Eric <venner at gmail.com> escribió:

> I have some working code, but I realized it is just the way I would
> write it in C, which means there is probably a better (more pythonic)
> way of doing it.
>
> Here's the section of code:
>
>     accumulate = firstIsCaps = False
>     accumStart = i = 0
>     while i < len(words):
>         firstIsCaps = firstIsCapitalized(words[i])
>         if firstIsCaps and not accumulate:
>             accumStart, accumulate = i, True
>         elif accumulate and not firstIsCaps:
>             doSomething(words[accumStart : i])
>             accumulate = False
>         i += 1
>
> words is a big long array of strings.  What I want to do is find
> consecutive sequences of words that have the first letter capitalized,
> and then call doSomething on them.  (And you can ignore the fact that
> it won't find a sequence at the very end of words, that is fine for my
> purposes).

Using groupby:

py> from itertools import groupby
py>
py> words = "Este es un Ejemplo. Los Ejemplos usualmente son tontos. Yo  
siempre
escribo tonterias.".split()
py>
py> for upper, group in groupby(words, str.istitle):
...     if upper:
...         print list(group) # doSomething(list(group))
...
['Este']
['Ejemplo.', 'Los', 'Ejemplos']
['Yo']

You could replace your firstIsCapitalized function instead of the string  
method istitle(), but I think it's the same. See  
http://docs.python.org/lib/itertools-functions.html

-- 
Gabriel Genellina