Ray wrote:
> I just wrote a short script that generates look and say sequence. What
> do you Python guys think of it? Too "Java-ish"?
Yes, but that's beside the point. :)
I think your basic design was sound enough for this application
(presumably this isn't something that needs to run at high speed). I
found it a little hard to understand what was going on. Part of this was
due to variable and function naming choices. Converting between strs and
ints all the time is confusing too.
I think this version might be a little easier to understand, and
describe() should work for any string, not just integers. I think your
original version does as well:
def describe(string):
last_char = ""
last_count = ""
res = []
for char in string:
if char == last_char:
last_count += 1
else:
res.extend([str(last_count), last_char])
last_char = char
last_count = 1
res.extend([str(last_count), last_char])
return "".join(res)
def describe_generator(start, count):
string = str(start)
for index in xrange(count):
yield string
string = describe(string)
print list(describe_generator(1, 30))
As requested, here's a more concise, but difficult to understand version
of describe() using regexes:
import re
re_describe = re.compile(r"(.)\1*")
def describe(string):
runs = re_describe.finditer(str(string))
return "".join("".join([str(len(run.group(0))), run.group(0)[0]])
for run in runs)
While it is fewer lines of code, it's not as easy to see what this
*thing* does immediately upon looking at it. So I'd try to avoid this
version, really.
--
Michael Hoffman
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
