[Tutor] Beginners question

[DL Neil]

On 5/04/20 1:53 PM, Alex Kleider wrote:
> 
> I've been surprised not to have seen, in this thread, any mention made 
> of the following use pattern:
> 
> print("{first} {last}, {address}, {city}, {province}, {code}, 
> {country}".format(**record))
> 
> Is this possible with any of the other (is it three) formatting methods?
> It's a pattern I've come to appreciate very very much.


+1

Possibly not as popular as deserved because it tastes of commercial 
application, and thus falls outside the ambit of scientists, data 
scientists, ML/AI engineers, liars, damned liars, statisticians...

I dislike using relative positioning for anything (it slows 
reading/comprehension) - which condemns older string-formatting methods 
(in my eyes).

If the mix of data-values and string-constants reaches a certain point, 
instead of throwing the usual tuple of data at print(), I find f-strings 
coming into play.

Contrarily, when working with classes/objects I rapidly grew sick of 
writing self. or instanceNM. in front of every attribute to be printed!

That in-turn became a recommendation for classes to include an as_dict() 
method (or two), eg

class Person():
	def __init__( self, first, last, ...):
		...
	@property
	def address_as_dict( self ):
		return ...

then the above print() becomes:

print( "{first} {last}, {address}, {city}, {province}, {code},
		{country}".format( instance.address_as_dict ) )

(even easier if that combination of fields is already a data-structure 
within the class)
-- 
Regards =dn