On Apr 10, 5:07 pm, Mike H <cmh.pyt...@gmail.com> wrote: > From playing around with other examples, I get the feeling > that Python is calculating both values (inst and '"'+inst+'"') > before selecting which one to pass to the new list. Am I right?
I believe so. (I'm sure the experts here will tell you more definitively.) > Is there any way I can do this using list comprehension? Yes. If you are using 2.5 or later, you can do this: Python 2.6.1 (r261:67517, Dec 4 2008, 16:51:00) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win32 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> a=['test',1,'two'] >>> b=[(x if not isinstance(x, str) else '"'+x+'"') for x in a] >>> b ['"test"', 1, '"two"'] >>> If you are trying to make a CSV file, then even better may be to use the csv module. John -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list