[Tutor] or synxtax in if statement

[David Bear]

I think I want to be lazy and express this

if a == b | a = c
(if a equal b or a equals c)
using

if a == b | c

it seems to work.. but I'm not sure if it is correct -- and I haven't seen
any documentation on using this type of syntax.


-- 
--
David Bear
College of Public Programs at Arizona State University

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[Tutor] unicode encoding hell

[David Bear]

I'm using universal feed parser to grab an rss feed.

I'm carefull not to use any sys.out, print, file write ops, etc, UNLESS I
use a decode('utf-i') to convert the unicode string I get from feed parser
to utf-8. However, I'm still getting the blasted decode error stating that
one of the items in the unicode string is out range. I've checked the
encoding from the feed and it does indeed say it is utf-8. The content-type
header is set to application/rss+xml . I am using the following syntax on a
feedparser object:

feedp.entry.title.decode('utf-8', 'xmlcharrefreplace')

I assume it would take any unicode character and 'do the right thing',
including replacing higher ordinal chars with xml entity refs. But I still
get

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2019' in
position 31: ordinal not in range(128)

Clearly, I completely do not understand how unicode is working here. Can
anyone enlighten me?


--
David Bear
College of Public Programs at Arizona State University

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[Tutor] getting iteration level

[David Bear]

Lets say I have a list object that I iterate over like this:

for item in myList:
   process(item)

During execution of the for loop something happens and I want to know how
many items have be iterated over, how do I find out? Without resorting to
some counter inside the loop, is there some python object I can ask?


--
David Bear
College of Public Programs at Arizona State University

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Tutor maillist  -  Tutor@python.org
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[Tutor] appending to a list

[David Bear]

I want to return a tuple from a function. I want to append the second
element of that tupple to a list. For example

mylist = []
def somefunc():
   return(3.14, 'some string')

somenum, mylist.append(??) somefunc()

obviously, the syntax doesn't work. This should be easy, but I've never seen
example code. any pointers?


-- 
--
David Bear
College of Public Programs at Arizona State University

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