[Tutor] a quick Q: what does the "collapse" mean?

[Andre Engels]

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 4:16 PM, lina <lina.lastname at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 9:59 PM, Alan Gauld <alan.gauld at btinternet.com>
> wrote:
> > On 08/09/11 14:02, lina wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I failed to understand the "collpase" meaning in a string.
> >>
> >> can someone give me a simple example?
> >
> > Can you give us some context?
> > Its not a method of a string object so far as I can tell?
> > Where did you read about it?
>
> >From "dive into python",
>
> http://diveintopython.org/
>
> one example:
>
> def info(object, spacing=10, collapse=1):
>    """Print methods and docs strings.
>
>    Take modules, class, list, dictionary, or strong."""
>    methodList = [e for e in dir(object) if callable(getattr(object, e))]
>    processFunc = collapse and (lambda s: " ".join(s.split())) or (lambda s:
> s)
>    print "\n".join(["%s %s" %
>                    (method.ljust(spacing),
>                    processFunc(str(getattr(object, method).__doc__)))
>                    for method in methodList])
>
> if __name__ == "__main__":
>    print info.__doc__
>
> I felt so hard to understand the collapse,
>
> Please don't discourage me telling me it's an old book,
> To me I started reading till 42 pages. let me finish it.
>
> I used to study python on and off,
> sometimes give a whole week, but due to not using it,
> so
> it's frustrating that when I really needed it, I barely could complete one.
>

Reading this, it seems that 'collapse' is a variable defined somewhere else
in the code.

-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
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