[Python-ideas] new format spec for iterable types

[Ron Adam]

On 09/08/2015 09:37 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Oscar Benjamin writes:
>
>   > ATM the colon separates the part of the format element that is
>   > interpreted by the format method to find the formatted object from the
>   > part that is passed to the __format__ method of the formatted object.
>   > Perhaps an additional colon could be used to separate the separator
>   > for when the formatted object is an iterable so that
>   >
>   >      'foo {name:<fmt>:<sep>} bar'.format(name=<expr>)
>
> I thought about a colon, but that loses if the objects are times.  I
> guess that kills '/' and '-', too, since the objects might be dates.
> Of course there may be a tricky way to use these that I haven't
> thought of, or they could be escaped for use in <fmt>.

This seems to me to need a nested format spec.  An outer one to format 
the whole list, and an inner one to format each item.

     f"foo {', '.join(f'{x:inner_spec}' for x in iter):outer_spec}"



Actually this is how I'd rather write it.

      "foo " + l.fmap(inner_spec).join(', ').fstr(outer_spec)

But sequences don't have the methods to write it that way.


 >>> l = range(10)
 >>> "foo" + format(','.join(map(lambda x: format(x, '>5'), l)), '>50')
'foo    0,    1,    2,    3,    4,    5,    6,    7,    8,    9'

It took me a few times to get that right.


Cheers,
     Ron