getlist question

[MRAB]

Victor Subervi wrote:
> Hi;
> I have the following code:
> 
>       try:
>         trueVal = form.getlist(storeColNames[i])
>         colNames.append(storeColNames[i])
>         if len(trueVal) > 1:
>           trueVal = string.join(trueVal, ',')

Unless you're using a very old version of Python, you should be using
the string method:

           trueVal = ','.join(trueVal)

>           values.append(trueVal)
>         elif len(trueVal) == 1:
>           print storeColNames[i], trueVal, '<br />'
>           trueVal = '%s' % trueVal[0]
>           values.append(trueVal)
>         if len(trueVal) > 0:
>           sql = '%s="%s"' % (storeColNames[i], trueVal)
>           sqlUpdate.append(sql)
>       except:
>         raise
> 
> This works fine except when storeColNames[i] returns no data. Now, if I 
> were dealing with getfirst instead of getlist, I could easily put in a 
> nonsense default data value such as '%$#' and check for that. But how 
> can I do that or something similar (and preferably more elegant) with 
> getlist, which takes only the one name parameter?
> 
You just need to check whether len(trueVal) == 0. Simple.