On Wed, 30 Mar 2022 at 15:11, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephenjturnb...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Chris Angelico writes: > > > [fruit] = sscanf(sample, "%*sfruit:%s\n") > > I'm warming to this idea. It does hit the sweet spot of doing exactly > what you want -- except when it can't do what you want at all. :-) > It's concise and quite powerful, applicable to many common use cases.
It fits nicely between "x,sep,y = str.partition(...)" and a regular expression. > I do have one windowframe of the bikeshed to paint: this is Python, so > maybe just "scanf" is a fine name? Sure, whether it's scanf or sscanf doesn't really matter to me. And - I had to look this up - the converse is referred to in the docs as "printf-style formatting", not sprintf. So that's an argument in favour of "scanf". > The first argument can be any > iterable of characters, and if an iterator it would leave the > iteration pointer where it left off (eg, beginning of next line in > 'sample' above). Hmm, I'm not really a fan. To be efficient, scanf will need to be able to use core string searching functionality - str.index() is faster than simply iterating over a string and comparing character by character. I don't think, for instance, that json.load() promises anything about where it leaves an iterable; in fact, I believe it simply reads everything into a string and then parses that. It would be worth supporting both byte strings and text strings, though, for the same reason that they both support printf formatting. ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/5LHEYKCKVIYHEVCBVVEZDCWCZ4SCZKRX/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
