I feel stoopid ... this code is to verbose

[David Eppstein]

In article <3D0A1791.3060307 at mxm.dk>, Max M <maxm at mxm.dk> wrote:

> I just cannot seem to find the nice 3-liner I expected from the 
> beginning. Has anybody got a better solution ? I thought somebody might 
> find it a fun exercise. Well I have...

My attempt:

def stringSlicer(string, chunkSize = 3, sep='.'):
   x = (len(string)-1)%chunkSize + 1
   C = [string[max(0,chunkSize*(i-1)+x):chunkSize*i+x] \
        for i in range((len(string)+chunkSize-1)//chunkSize)]
   return sep.join(C)

I've split it into four lines for better readability -- you could get a 
one-liner (without lambda or and-or tricks) by expanding the variables
(imagine the following all on one line):

def stringSlicer(string, chunkSize = 3):
   return sep.join([string[max(0,chunkSize*(i-1) + \
                             (len(string)-1)%chunkSize+1) : \
                           chunkSize*i+(len(string)-1)%chunkSize+1] \
                 for i in range((len(string)+chunkSize-1)//chunkSize)])

-- 
David Eppstein       UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
eppstein at ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/