At Monday 4/12/2006 21:20, manstey wrote:
Is there a neat way to write a function that can receive either a
string or a list of strings, and then if it receives a string it
manipulates that, otherwise it manipulates each string in the list?
That is, rather than having to send a list of one member
MyFunction(['var1']), I can send
MyFunction('var1') or MyFunction(['var1','var2',var3'])
That depends a bit on what you do with the argument. Sometimes it's
more clear to have two different methods, one for lists and another
for single items, specially when processing a list is *not* the same
as processing each item sequentially.
Another reason to have separate methods would be if you expect much
more calls to the single-item version than the list version.
If you want a combined version which accepts both strings and lists,
notice that unfortunately (or not!) strings and lists share a lot of
functionality. So you have to check for strings in your code, else
the first call would process 'v','a','r','1'.
That is, you usually write something like this:
def MyFunction(arg):
if isinstance(arg, basestring): arg = [arg] # or perhaps arg,
... process ...
So, if you *will* construct a list anyway, using MyFunction(['var1'])
in the first place would be better.
--
Gabriel Genellina
Softlab SRL
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