Wishlist: string attributes

[Nicodemus]

Alex Martelli wrote:

><posted & mailed>
>
>Raymond Hettinger wrote:
>
>  
>
>>"Stephen Boulet" <stephen.boulet at motorola.com> wrote in message
>>news:3E807948.5040401 at motorola.com...
>>    
>>
>>>Being a big fan of string methods, here's what I'd like to see for python
>>>      
>>>
>>strings:
>>    
>>
>>>I can access string methods like (str.lower) but I would like to be able
>>>      
>>>
>>to
>>    
>>
>>>access all string module attributes without importing the string module
>>>      
>>>
>>(like
>>    
>>
>>>str.ascii_lowercase, str.whitespace, etc.).
>>>      
>>>
>>The plan is to use functions like str.isascii() instead of attributes.
>>    
>>
>
>That covers the typical usecase of "if c in string.whatever:", and
>indeed may substantially improve performance for that use, but it's
>no big help for all other uses of having "all the letters" &c available,
>such as building tables for the wonderfully fast translate method
>of string objects.  Consider a typical case: I need to make a copy
>of a string that removes all non-digits (more often the issue will be
>"all non-printable characters" or the like, but I'm taking an example
>which today offers me both a .isXXX method AND a string.XXX attr).
>
>== rr.py:
>
>from string import digits, maketrans
>
>allchars = ''.join(map(chr, range(256)))
>notrans = maketrans('', '')
>nondigits = allchars.translate(notrans, digits)
>
>def rem1(s, notrans=notrans, nondigits=nondigits):
>        return s.translate(notrans, nondigits)
>
>def rem2(s):
>        return ''.join([c for c in s if c.isdigit()])
>
>def rem3(s):
>        return ''.join(filter(str.isdigit, s))
>
>
>s = '23skidoo and 148!'
>
>== end of rr.py
>
>[alex at lancelot alex]$ python timeit.py -s 'import rr' 'rr.rem1(rr.s)'
>100000 loops, best of 3: 7.6 usec per loop
>[alex at lancelot alex]$ python timeit.py -s 'import rr' 'rr.rem2(rr.s)'
>10000 loops, best of 3: 42.6 usec per loop
>[alex at lancelot alex]$ python timeit.py -s 'import rr' 'rr.rem3(rr.s)'
>10000 loops, best of 3: 34.7 usec per loop
>[alex at lancelot alex]$
>
>
>So, in practice, I *DO* still need a string of "all letters", "all
>printable characters", and the like, for purposes such as this one --
>even though I had a complete complement of .isXXX methods too.  Guess
>I can always ''.join(filter(str.isXXX, allchars)), but I'd much
>rather have the needed strings ready in the str class as I now have
>them in the string module... is there any technical impediment to
>supplying them?
>

Why not make this an attribute of the str type? You could access them 
using "str.digits".