Feature Proposal: Sequence .join method
Terry Reedy
tjreedy at udel.edu
Fri Sep 30 12:23:56 EDT 2005
"David Murmann" <david.murmann at rwth-aachen.de> wrote in message
news:3q3pt9Fd7pklU1 at news.dfncis.de...
>> def join(sep, seq):
>> return reduce(lambda x, y: x + sep + y, seq, type(sep)())
>
> damn, i wanted too much. Proper implementation:
>
> def join(sep, seq):
> if len(seq):
> return reduce(lambda x, y: x + sep + y, seq)
> return type(sep)()
>
> but still short enough
For general use, this is both too general and not general enough.
If len(seq) exists then seq is probably reiterable, in which case it may be
possible to determine the output length and preallocate to make the process
O(n) instead of O(n**2). I believe str.join does this. A user written
join for lists could also. A tuple function could make a list first and
then tuple(it) at the end.
If seq is a general (non-empty) iterable, len(seq) may raise an exception
even though the reduce would work fine.
Terry J. Reedy
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