For some reason, I seem recently to have needed to code a number of functions which take a list of strings as an argument:
setText(aWindow, ['a line', 'another line'])
You often need to pass only one string in, though, and I coded my functions such that you could do this in a 'natural' way:
setText(aWindow, 'just one line this time')
I coded this as follows:
def setText(window, text, append=False):
# Ensure that text is a list
try:
text + ''
text = [text]
except TypeError:
pass
# Rest of funtion, which can assume that 'text' is a list of strings
Robin Munn suggested an improvement to this:
try:
text + ''
except TypeError:
pass
else:
test = [text]
Nice. In my version, I'd have a problem in the (unlikely, but not impossible) case of test = [text] throwing a TypeError.
It's not a huge improvement, true, but I like it. A day in which I learn to improve is a day not wasted.
Posted to Python by Simon Brunning at May 11, 2004 01:01 PM