On 15/12/2011 18:51, Tim Chase wrote:
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.
I was going to question it too, but then I wondered what would happen if
there were a very large number of items and the string would be too big
for memory, for example, writing a list of all the numbers from one to a
billion to a file.
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