Original poster here.
Thank you all for your ideas. I certainly learned some great techniques
by studying everyone's solutions!!
I was thinking that there was a built-in function for this common(?) use
case which is why I shied away from writing my own in the first place
... hoping to not-reinvent the wheel, etc.
Here's the solution I came up with myself. Its not as sexy as some of
the posted solutions, but it does have the advantage of not failing when
the number of input chars <> the number of placeholders in the pic
string. I think it handles the edge cases pretty elegantly unless I'm
too close to the details to miss the obvious.
Any feedback on what follows would be appreciated.
# format s using a picture string
# stops processing when runs out of chars in s or pic string
# example: picture("123456789", "(@@@)-@@-(@@@)[...@]")
def picture( s, pic, placeholder="@" ):
s = list( s )
output = []
for sym in pic:
if sym <> placeholder:
output.append( sym )
elif len( s ):
output.append( s.pop( 0 ) )
else:
break
return ''.join( output )
# test cases
print picture("123456789", "(@@@)-@@-(@@@)[...@]")
print picture("123456789ABC", "(@@@)-@@-(@@@)[...@]")
print picture("1234", "(@@@)-@@-(@@@)[...@]")
print picture("123456789", "(@@@)-@@-(@@@)")
print picture("123456789", "(@@@)-@@-(@@@)[...@][@@@@@]")
Regards,
Malcolm
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