It's always been in the back of my mind that directly iterable strings are
very often more trouble than they are worth. But I also agree that changing
it would probably be extremely disruptive (and also might be more trouble
than it's worth).
I've only been at it for about 3 years, but because of iterable strings I
always seem to regret not using a function like this in many contexts:
def iter_nostr(iterable):
if isinstance(iterable, str):
raise TypeError(f"iterable cannot be a str")
yield from iter(iterable)
The nature of my coding work is a lot of parsing of different kinds of text
files and so I've had to write a lot of functions that are meant to take in
an iterable of strings. So the biggest context that comes to mind is to
guard against future me mistakenly sending a string into functions that are
intended to work with iterables of strings. I always seem to find a way to
do this, with all kinds of head scratching results depending on the
situation. I learned early on that if I don't include a guard like this,
I'm going to pay for it later.
---
Ricky.
"I've never met a Kentucky man who wasn't either thinking about going home
or actually going home." - Happy Chandler
On Sat, Feb 22, 2020 at 11:09 PM Steven D'Aprano <[email protected]>
wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 01:28:35AM -0000, Steve Jorgensen wrote:
>
> > Another issue is one of consistency. A string is not a sequence of
> > length-1 strings.
>
> Isn't it? It sure looks like a sequence of length-1 (sub)strings to me.
>
> Of course, strings can also be views as a sequence of paragraphs, lines,
> words, or any other sort of substring you like. Hypertalk allowed you to
> read strings in arbitrarily nested "chunks":
>
> get the last character of the first word of the third line of text
>
> with similar syntax for writing and iteration. One might argue that
> there's nothing particularly useful about characters, and treating
> strings as sequences of words, lines etc could be more useful. But I
> don't think we can argue that strings aren't sequences of
> substrings, including characters.
>
>
> > The length-1 strings created by iterating are more
> > like slices than members.
>
> They certainly aren't members (attributes). You can't access a
> particular substring using dot notation:
>
> # Give me the first char in the string
> c = string.0 # Syntax error.
>
> So substrings aren't attributes/members. What would you name them? The
> same applies to lists and other sequences as well.
>
>
>
> --
> Steven
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