On 12/15/11 12:19, Ethan Furman wrote:
Tim Chase wrote:
On 12/15/11 10:48, Roy Smith wrote:
I've got a list, ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']. I want to generate the string,
"a, b, c, and d" (I'll settle for no comma after 'c'). Is there some
standard way to do this, handling all the special cases?
If you have a list, it's pretty easy as MRAB suggests. For arbitrary
iterators, it's a bit more complex. Especially with the odd edge-case
of 2 items where there's no comma before the conjunction (where>2 has
the comma before the conjunction). If you were willing to forgo the
Oxford comma, it would tidy up the code a bit.
Why go through all that instead of just converting the iterator into a
list at the beginning of MRAB's solution and then running with it?
For the fun/challenge? Because you have a REALLY big data source
that you don't want to keep in memory (in addition the resulting
string)?
Yeah, for most non-pathological cases, it would make more sense
to just make it a list and then deal with the 4 cases (no
elements, one element, 2 elements, and >2 elements) individually.
-tkc
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