quite so, i rephrased docstring to be: """criteria is an iterable containing either '*' instances or strings of comma-separated integers. e.g. ['*','1,2,3', '11,12']"""
thanks very much for the idea! upon further reflection, this seems to be a more elegant solution for my case than the ad-hoc generator or list comprehension approach. this is because i *do* have to filter data based on multiple single field criteria and i know all of these criteria at the same time - so it makes a lot of sense to do as you have done and then only do one filter operation to pull out all the objects i am interested in. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
