[Tutor] breakfast of champions [pydoc/overcommenting?/functions]

[Danny Yoo]

On Wed, 12 Dec 2001, Kirk Bailey wrote:

> cold pizzia.

Don't stay up too late.  *grin* I'm jealous; I have to wake up earlier
tomorrow.  Eat some veggies too.


> digest them rfc822 headers still. Coming along. Found the definition for
> find int he on line documenting. Makes sense really, although I would
> have thought there would be a search method alredy in the language, but
> hey, it works.

There is something of a search method in the 'pydoc' module.  After
importing the pydoc module, try typing:

###
pydoc.help('string')
###

from an interpreter, and you should see a bunch of help.


In fact, strings already have a find() function:

###
>>> pydoc.help('string.find')
Help on function find in string:

find(s, *args)
    find(s, sub [,start [,end]]) -> in
    
    Return the lowest index in s where substring sub is found,
    such that sub is contained within s[start,end].  Optional
    arguments start and end are interpreted as in slice notation.
    
    Return -1 on failure.
###

so you can just use it: you don't have to define it again.



> Also must add a loop to read the subscriber file and STRIP OFF the \n
> on the end of each line, and append it to the list before searching
> it, as it kills the search. Pity I cannot think of way to do that on
> the fly while loading with readlines. Any suggestions?

You'll like this one: you can use a string.replace() to remove '\n's from
a string that you're reading.  For example:

###
>>> s = 'this is a string\n\nwith newlines\n'    
>>> import string
>>> string.replace(s, '\n', '')
'this is a stringwith newlines'
###




It's my personal opinion that your code has way too many comments.  
*grin* I think that things like:


> localhost = 'howlermonkey.net' # make sure you set this to the domain
                                 # YOU use!!!


are fine, but that:


> listname = sys.argv[1]	# we read a command line arguement to
                                # determine the list name
				# Arguement 0 is the name of
				# the script run, 1 is the
				# first arguement.
				# after that name in the command line,
				# so if this were program FOO,
				# that line would be "|/path/FOO listname"
				# and the arguement here would be 'listname'!

and examples like that are overkill.  These are just an opinion though, so
don't take me too seriously on this.


You have a large portion of code that begins here:


> 		subject = '[' + listname + ']' + subject		# then acept the submission.
> 		Reply_to = listname + "@" + localhost		# this sets the reply-to field.
[... code cut]


that may be a prime candidate for a function --- it could be something
that constructsMessage() or something to that effect.