> As it seems, this would be far easier with python 2.x. With python 3 > and its strict distinction between "str" and "bytes", things gets > syntactically pretty awkward and error-prone (something as innocently > looking like "s=s+'/'" hidden in a rarely reached branch and a > seemingly correct program will crash with a TypeError 2 years > later ...)
Just a small note as you are new to Python, string concatenation can be expensive (quadratic time). The Python (2.x and 3.x) idiom for frequent string concatenation is to append to a list and then join them like the following (linear time). >>>lst = [ 'Hi,' ] >>>lst.append( 'how' ) >>>lst.append( 'are' ) >>>lst.append( 'you?' ) >>>sentence = ' '.join( lst ) # use a space separating each element >>>print sentence Hi, how are you? You can use join on an empty string, but then they will not be separated by spaces. >>>sentence = ''.join( lst ) # empty string so no separation >>>print sentence Hi,howareyou? You can use any string as a separator, length does not matter. >>>sentence = '@-Q'.join( lst ) >>>print sentence Hi,@-Qhow@-Qare@-Qyou? Ramit Ramit Prasad | JPMorgan Chase Investment Bank | Currencies Technology 712 Main Street | Houston, TX 77002 work phone: 713 - 216 - 5423 -- This email is confidential and subject to important disclaimers and conditions including on offers for the purchase or sale of securities, accuracy and completeness of information, viruses, confidentiality, legal privilege, and legal entity disclaimers, available at http://www.jpmorgan.com/pages/disclosures/email. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
