String handling and the percent operator

[Simon Forman]

Tom Plunket wrote:
> I have some code to autogenerate some boilerplate code so that I don't
> need to do the tedious setup stuff when I want to create a new module.
>
> So, my script prompts the user for the module name, then opens two
> files and those files each get the contents of one of these functions:
>
> def GetPyContents(module):
> 	boilerplate = \
> """
> class %s:
> 	pass
>
> if __name__ == '__main__':
> 	import unittest
> 	unittest.main('%s_t')
> """
>
> 	return boilerplate % ((module,) * 2)
>
> def GetTestContents(module):
> 	boilerplate = \
> """from %s import *
> import unittest
>
> class Test%s(unittest.TestCase):
> 	def testConstruction(self):
> 		self.failUnless(%s())
>
> 	def testWriteMoreTests(self):
> 		self.fail('This test should fail.')
>
> if __name__ == '__main__':
> 	unittest.main()
> """
>
> 	return boilerplate % ((module,) * 3)
>
> My question is, I don't like hardcoding the number of times that the
> module name should be repeated in the two return functions.  Is there
> an straight forward (inline-appropriate) way to count the number of
> '%s'es in the 'boilerplate' strings?  ...or maybe a different and more
> Pythonic way to do this?  (Maybe I could somehow use generators?)
>
> thx.
> -tom!


strings have a count() method.

Since you know that you won't have things like '%%s' in your
boilerplate, it's perfectly reasonable to use:

return boilerplate % ((module,) * boilerplate.count('%s'))

in your code.

Peace,
~Simon

return boilerplate % ((module,) * 3)