Newbie: returning dynamicly built lists (using win32com)

[Fredrik Lundh]

Ransom wrote:

> Very newb here, but my question will hopefully be obvious to someone.

> OK, so what is happening is that I am sending a list of data to an
> overly complicated spreadsheet that produces it's own output (in cell
> 32,6). As I loop through multiple test cases, the print statement
> calling into COM for the cell data seems to be printing out results
> just fine. But when I try and put the output from the spreadsheet into
> a dynamic list after the TODO section thusly:
> 
>         outputlist = []
>         outputlist.extend(excel.ActiveSheet.Cells(32,6)
>         return outputlist
> 
> I get an error like:
> [<win32com.gen_py.Microsoft Excel 9.0 Object Library.Range instance at
> 0x15450880>]

the Cells call returns some kind of internal win32com object, not strings.

Python has two different ways of converting an object to a string of 
characters; str() and repr():

     http://pyref.infogami.com/str
     http://pyref.infogami.com/repr

when you print an object, Python uses str() to do the conversion.

however, when you print a container, the container object's str() 
implementation often uses repr() on the members.

to apply str() to all list members, you can simply do:

     outputlist = map(str, outputlist)
     print outputlist

or

     print map(str, outputlist)

or some other variation thereof.

</F>