[Python-Dev] s1 == (sf % (s1 / sf))? A bad idea?

[Dinu Gherman]

> Examples
> 
>     Here is an example of an interactive session exhibiting the
>     expected behaviour of this feature.
> 
>         >>> "12345 John Doe" / "%5d %8s"
>         (12345, 'John Doe')
>         >>> "12 34 56 7.890" / "%d %d %d %f"
>         (12, 34, 56, 7.8899999999999997)
>         >>> "12345 John Doe, Foo Bar" / "%(num)d %(n)s, %(f)s %(b)s"
>         {'n': 'John Doe', 'f': 'Foo', 'b': 'Bar', 'num': 12345}
>         >>> "1 2" / "%d %d %d"
>         Traceback (innermost last):
>           File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
>         TypeError: not all arguments filled
 

Kind of late to jump in, but this is the nature of this list.

I'd like to support Peter's proposal for having *some* kind 
of inverse mechanism to string formatting using '%'. Now, that
doesn't mean anything, of course, but no matter what the syn-
tax would look like: I'd prefer having that feature over not
having it and I'll give an example below.

Reminding you of a thread I triggered a while ago (that went 
slightly astray) which was, kind of, received with suspicion,
I notice that it matches quite nicely with Peter's (more ge-
neral) idea. Here's the thread's summary:

  Grouping function for string module?          
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/1999-September/011875.html

Combining this I'd like to see something like the following 
(again, maybe with a different syntax):

    >>> "1010000011110101" / "%4s%4s%4s%4s"
    ('1010', '0000', '1111', '0101')
    >>> "10100000111101" / "%4s%4s%4s%4s"
    ('1010', '0000', '1111', '01')

or even:

    >>> "1010000011110101" / ("%4s" * 4)
    ('1010', '0000', '1111', '0101')

;-)

Regards and Happy Easter (will be away for a week)!

Dinu

-- 
Dinu C. Gherman
ReportLab Consultant - http://www.reportlab.com
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