> Or can be used directly as an integer index to get a character > > >>> ['01'[x in a] for x in xrange(10)] > ['0', '0', '0', '1', '1', '0', '1', '0', '0', '0'] > Very cool -- this does the trick nicely and seems quite extensible, now that I get the basic idiom. Belated thanks for the quick replies on this one! Ramon