"Deborah Swanson" <pyt...@deborahswanson.net> writes: > I'm still wondering if these 4 lines can be collapsed to one or two > lines.
In the trade that's what we call a "code smell", a sign that code (even if it works) should probably be re-thought after taking a step back to understand what it is really trying to do. What you seem to want is to take two strings, and if exactly one of them is empty, then change the empty one to be the same as the non-empty one. Leaving aside the subscripts and just calling them x and y, x, y = x or y, y or x is a concise way to do it. That's also smelly since 1) it's overly cute, and 2) it's not clear to me why you'd want to do this operation. It seems like an odd thing to want so maybe there's some different way to solve the surrounding problem. If you want to describe the actual application and context where this appears, that might get some helpful comments. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
