Dave Angel wrote:
Dieter Maurer wrote:
Christian Heimes <li...@cheimes.de> writes on Fri, 16 Oct 2009
17:58:29 +0200:
Alan G Isaac schrieb:
I expected this to be fixed in Python 3:
sum(['ab','cd'],'')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: sum() can't sum strings [use ''.join(seq) instead]
Of course it is not a good way to join strings,
but it should work, should it not? Naturally,
It's not a bug. sum() doesn't work on strings deliberately. ''.join()
*is* the right and good way to concatenate strings.
Apparently, "sum" special cases 'str' in order to teach people to use
"join".
It would have been as much work and much more friendly, to just use
"join"
internally to implement "sum" when this is possible.
Dieter
Earlier, I would have agreed with you. I assumed that this could be
done invisibly, with the only difference being performance. But you
can't know whether join will do the trick without error till you know
that all the items are strings or Unicode strings. And you can't check
that without going through the entire iterator. At that point it's too
late to change your mind, as you can't back up an iterator. So the user
who supplies a list with mixed strings and other stuff will get an
unexpected error, one that join generates.
To put it simply, I'd say that sum() should not dispatch to join()
unless it could be sure that no errors might result.
DaveA
How is this different than passing a list to sum with other incompatible
types?
Python 2.5.4 (r254:67916, Dec 23 2008, 15:10:54) [MSC v.1310 32 bit
(Intel)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> class Dummy(object):
... pass
...
>>> test1 = [1, 2, 3.4, Dummy()]
>>> sum(test1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'float' and 'Dummy'
>>> test2 = ['a', 'string', 'and', 'a', Dummy()]
>>> ''.join(test2)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: sequence item 4: expected string, Dummy found
Looks like a TypeError either way, only the verbage changes.
~Ethan~
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