Best way to enumerate something in python

[David Stockwell]

Hi Roy,

I'm just trying to bring some order to the existing code base.  I've been 
asked to write completely new code.  When I asked the previous developers 
how they did it, they admitted its all hard coded currently.   So the 
question I asked then was, what do you do when a column name or table name 
changes?  I was told, they don't.   Basically if the names ever did change, 
their code would break.

With my approach, since I am defining the table, I have all that placed in 
one area and people can reference it.  Although i switched to the enumerate 
example that was previously provided because it was much easier to do.


David
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>From: Roy Smith <roy at panix.com>
>To: python-list at python.org
>Subject: Re: Best way to enumerate something in python
>Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 13:31:04 -0400
>
>In article <mailman.360.1085665812.6949.python-list at python.org>,
>  "David Stockwell" <winexpert at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > FWIW this is what I'm going to do for enumerated types in python.  Its 
>not
> > perfect but it will make it fairly easy to get at column names so I can
> > build SQL statements on the fly and still have fairly easy to maintain 
>code
> >
> > #setup stuff
> > NAME_COL,     ADDRESS_COL,    CITY_COL,  ZIPCODE_COL, \
> > STATE_COL,    COUNTRY_COL,    SS_COL,    CAT_COL, \
> > DATE_COL,     SALARY_COL                              = range(10)
> >
> > mycol = {
> >       NAME_COL: " NAME ",   ADDRESS_COL: " ADDRESS ",
> >       CITY_COL: " CITY ",   ZIPCODE_COL: " ZIPCODE ",
> >       STATE_COL:" STATE ", COUNTRY_COL:  " COUNTRY ",
> >       SS_COL:   " SS ",       CAT_COL:   " CAT ",
> >       DATE_COL: " DATE ",   SALARY_COL:  " SALARY " }
> > # Use these for indexing by column name
>
>I'm not sure what problem you're trying to solve here, but I suspect the
>cure is worse than the disease.  This seems like a lot of error-prone
>typing, and I'm not sure what the benefit is.
>
>What happens when your SQL schema changes?  You need to make multiple
>changes to the above code to handle adding or deleting a column.
>
> > print mycol[CITY_COL]
>
>How is that any better than:
>
>print "CITY"
>--
>http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

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