[IPython-dev] Expanding $a to 'f1 f2' when $a is ['f1','f2']

[Ville Vainio]

On Wed, 2005-03-16 at 15:18 -0700, Fernando Perez wrote:

> Sorry, but the amount of special-casing that this would require is almost 
> guaranteed to break somewhere.  Keep in mind that you can evaluate arbitrary 
> code in $ expressions, so you can do:
> 
> rm ${' '.join(junk)}
> 
> Not the cleanest, but it works.
> 
> The problem is that I simply don't see a way to generically distinguish when 
> $foo should be evaluated as a list joined on whitespace and when it should be 
> treated as a list.  The $ evaluation mechanism is actually a full-blown 
> generic interpolation module, Ka-Ping Yee's Itpl, from PEP-215:
> 
> http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0215.html
> 
> How do you propose such a mechanism do what you want in a generic, safe way? 

1. If it's just $junk (i.e. not ${junk})

2. not isinstance(junk, basestring)

3. iter(junk) does not raise TypeError

-> Expand it as " ".join(junk)