Python. Why the length of the list changes after turning it from int to string? - python-3.x

I have a bunch of users in a list called UserList.
And I do not want the output to have the square brackets, so I run this line:
UserList = [1,2,3,4...]
UserListNoBrackets = str(UserList).strip('[]')
But if I run:
len(UserList) #prints22 (which is correct).
However:
len(UserListNoBrackets) #prints 170 (whaaat?!)
Anyway, the output is actually correct (I'm pretty sure). Just wondering why that happens.

Here:
UserListNoBrackets = str(UserList).strip('[]')
UserListNoBrackets is a string. A string is a sequence of characters, and len(str) returns the numbers of characters in the string. A comma is a character, a white space is a character, and the string represention of an integer has has many characters as there are digits in the integer. So obviously, the length of your UserListNoBrackets string is much greater than the length of you UserList list.

You probably need str.join
Ex:
user_list = [1,2,3,4...]
print(",".join(map(str, user_list)))
Note:
Using map method to convert all int elements in list to string.

Related

What is the difference between strings and characters in Matlab?

What is the difference between string and character class in MATLAB?
a = 'AX'; % This is a character.
b = string(a) % This is a string.
The documentation suggests:
There are two ways to represent text in MATLAB®. You can store text in character arrays. A typical use is to store short pieces of text as character vectors. And starting in Release 2016b, you can also store multiple pieces of text in string arrays. String arrays provide a set of functions for working with text as data.
This is how the two representations differ:
Element access. To represent char vectors of different length, one had to use cell arrays, e.g. ch = {'a', 'ab', 'abc'}. With strings, they can be created in actual arrays: str = [string('a'), string('ab'), string('abc')].
However, to index characters in a string array directly, the curly bracket notation has to be used:
str{3}(2) % == 'b'
Memory use. Chars use exactly two bytes per character. strings have overhead:
a = 'abc'
b = string('abc')
whos a b
returns
Name Size Bytes Class Attributes
a 1x3 6 char
b 1x1 132 string
The best place to start for understanding the difference is the documentation. The key difference, as stated there:
A character array is a sequence of characters, just as a numeric array is a sequence of numbers. A typical use is to store short pieces of text as character vectors, such as c = 'Hello World';.
A string array is a container for pieces of text. String arrays provide a set of functions for working with text as data. To convert text to string arrays, use the string function.
Here are a few more key points about their differences:
They are different classes (i.e. types): char versus string. As such they will have different sets of methods defined for each. Think about what sort of operations you want to do on your text, then choose the one that best supports those.
Since a string is a container class, be mindful of how its size differs from an equivalent character array representation. Using your example:
>> a = 'AX'; % This is a character.
>> b = string(a) % This is a string.
>> whos
Name Size Bytes Class Attributes
a 1x2 4 char
b 1x1 134 string
Notice that the string container lists its size as 1x1 (and takes up more bytes in memory) while the character array is, as its name implies, a 1x2 array of characters.
They can't always be used interchangeably, and you may need to convert between the two for certain operations. For example, string objects can't be used as dynamic field names for structure indexing:
>> s = struct('a', 1);
>> name = string('a');
>> s.(name)
Argument to dynamic structure reference must evaluate to a valid field name.
>> s.(char(name))
ans =
1
Strings do have a bit of overhead, but still increase by 2 bytes per character. After every 8 characters it increases the size of the variable. The red line is y=2x+127.
figure is created using:
v=[];N=100;
for ct = 1:N
s=char(randi([0 255],[1,ct]));
s=string(s);
a=whos('s');v(ct)=a.bytes;
end
figure(1);clf
plot(v)
xlabel('# characters')
ylabel('# bytes')
p=polyfit(1:N,v,1);
hold on
plot([0,N],[127,2*N+127],'r')
hold off
One important practical thing to note is, that strings and chars behave differently when interacting with square brackets. This can be especially confusing when coming from python. consider following example:
>>['asdf' '123']
ans =
'asdf123'
>> ["asdf" "123"]
ans =
1×2 string array
"asdf" "123"

Convert a string into an integer of its ascii values

I am trying to write a function that takes a string txt and returns an int of that string's character's ascii numbers. It also takes a second argument, n, that is an int that specified the number of digits that each character should translate to. The default value of n is 3. n is always > 3 and the string input is always non-empty.
Example outputs:
string_to_number('fff')
102102102
string_to_number('ABBA', n = 4)
65006600660065
My current strategy is to split txt into its characters by converting it into a list. Then, I convert the characters into their ord values and append this to a new list. I then try to combine the elements in this new list into a number (e.g. I would go from ['102', '102', '102'] to ['102102102']. Then I try to convert the first element of this list (aka the only element), into an integer. My current code looks like this:
def string_to_number(txt, n=3):
characters = list(txt)
ord_values = []
for character in characters:
ord_values.append(ord(character))
joined_ord_values = ''.join(ord_values)
final_number = int(joined_ord_values[0])
return final_number
The issue is that I get a Type Error. I can write code that successfully returns the integer of a single-character string, however when it comes to ones that contain more than one character, I can't because of this type error. Is there any way of fixing this. Thank you, and apologies if this is quite long.
Try this:
def string_to_number(text, n=3):
return int(''.join('{:0>{}}'.format(ord(c), n) for c in text))
print(string_to_number('fff'))
print(string_to_number('ABBA', n=4))
Output:
102102102
65006600660065
Edit: without list comprehension, as OP asked in the comment
def string_to_number(text, n=3):
l = []
for c in text:
l.append('{:0>{}}'.format(ord(c), n))
return int(''.join(l))
Useful link(s):
string formatting in python: contains pretty much everything you need to know about string formatting in python
The join method expects an array of strings, so you'll need to convert your ASCII codes into strings. This almost gets it done:
ord_values.append(str(ord(character)))
except that it doesn't respect your number-of-digits requirement.

Removing first character from a string in octave

I wanted to know how to remove first character of a string in octave. I am manipulating the string in a loop and after every loop, I want to remove the first character of the remaining string.
Thanks in advance.
If it's just a one-line string then:
short_string = long_string(2:end)
But if you have a cell array of strings then either do it as above if you have a loop already, otherwise you can use this shorthand to do it in one line:
short_strings = cellfun(#(x)(x(2:end)), long_strings, 'uni', false)
Or else if you have a matrix of strings (i.e. all the same length), then you can vectorize it as:
short_strings = long_strings(:, 2:end)

AS3 - "\u2605" NOT the same as "\\u"+"2605"?

Trying to make a textfield where people write the unicode without the backslash. I want to add the backslash after they typed it. So the user types u2605 and the code converts it to "\u2605", i then convert this to a unicode character and insert it in textflow.
My code:
this works:
span.text = publicFunctions.htmlUnescape(he.encode("\u2605"))
this doesn't work:
span.text = publicFunctions.htmlUnescape(he.encode("\\u"+"2605"))
how to make a string that acts as a unicode string?
Tried all sorts of things, escape(unescape()), convert to number, "\u", "\u" ... nothing helps.
trace("\u2605" == "\u"+"2605") ... will return false. So will
trace("\u2605" == "\u"+"2605")
"\u2605" is a string with a single character, the character with the code point 2605, while "\\u" + "2605" is a string with 6 characters (the backslash, the u and the four digit number).
If you want to construct a unicode character from just the four digits, you should be able to use String.fromCharCode. The thing is just that the escape sequence uses a hexadecimal number, while the method obviously takes a decimal number. So if the user enters a hexadecimal string, you will have to convert that first:
trace(String.fromCharCode(parseInt('2605', 16)) == '\u2605'));
That's an interesting issue! I don't think you can concatenate a string literal and achieve what you're trying to do. The relevant character escaping happens when the string literal is originally formed, which means that you need the whole sequence together in the first place.
But you should be able to take the user-supplied number and dynamically generate a Unicode string with String.fromCharCode(...).
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/String.html#fromCharCode()

Array of Strings in Fortran 77

I've a question about Fortran 77 and I've not been able to find a solution.
I'm trying to store an array of strings defined as the following:
character matname(255)*255
Which is an array of 255 strings of length 255.
Later I read the list of names from a file and I set the content of the array like this:
matname(matcount) = mname
EDIT: Actually mname value is hardcoded as mname = 'AIR' of type character*255, it is a parameter of a function matadd() which executes the previous line. But this is only for testing, in the future it will be read from a file.
Later on I want to print it with:
write(*,*) matname(matidx)
But it seems to print all the 255 characters, it prints the string I assigned and a lot of garbage.
So that is my question, how can I know the length of the string stored?
Should I have another array with all the lengths?
And how can I know the length of the string read?
Thanks.
You can use this function to get the length (without blank tail)
integer function strlen(st)
integer i
character st*(*)
i = len(st)
do while (st(i:i) .eq. ' ')
i = i - 1
enddo
strlen = i
return
end
Got from here: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/ch2-13.html
PS: When you say: matname(matidx) it gets the whole string(256) chars... so that is your string plus blanks or garbage
The function Timotei posted will give you the length of the string as long as the part of the string you are interested in only contains spaces, which, if you are assigning the values in the program should be true as FORTRAN is supposed to initialize the variables to be empty and for characters that means a space.
However, if you are reading in from a file you might pick up other control characters at the end of the lines (particularly carriage return and/or line feed characters, \r and/or \n depending on your OS). You should also toss those out in the function to get the correct string length. Otherwise you could get some funny print statements as those characters are printed as well.
Here is my version of the function that checks for alternate white space characters at the end besides spaces.
function strlen(st)
integer i,strlen
character st*(*)
i = len(st)
do while ((st(i:i).eq.' ').or.(st(i:i).eq.'\r').or.
+ (st(i:i).eq.'\n').or.(st(i:i).eq.'\t'))
i = i - 1
enddo
strlen = i
return
end
If there are other characters in the "garbage" section this still won't work completely.
Assuming that it does work for your data, however, you can then change your write statement to look like this:
write(*,*) matname(matidx)(1:strlen(matname(matidx)))
and it will print out just the actual string.
As to whether or not you should use another array to hold the lengths of the string, that is up to you. the strlen() function is O(n) whereas looking up the length in a table is O(1). If you find yourself computing the lengths of these static strings often, it may improve performance to compute the length once when they are read in, store them in an array and look them up if you need them. However, if you don't notice the slowdown, I wouldn't worry about it.
Depending on the compiler that you are using, you may be able to use the trim() intrinsic function to remove any leading/trailing spaces from a string, then process it as you normally would, i.e.
character(len=25) :: my_string
my_string = 'AIR'
write (*,*) ':', trim(my_string), ':'
should print :AIR:.
Edit:
Better yet, it looks like there is a len_trim() function that returns the length of a string after it has been trimmed.
intel and Compaq Visual Fortran have the intrinsic function LEN_TRIM(STRING) which returns the length without trailing blanks or spaces.
If you want to suppress leading blanks or spaces, use "Adjust Left" i.e. ADJUSTF(STRING)
In these FORTRANs I also note a useful feature: If you pass a string in to a function or subroutine as an argument, and inside the subroutine it is declared as CHARACTER*(*), then
using the LEN(STRING) function in the subroutine retruns the actual string length passed in, and not the length of the string as declared in the calling program.
Example:
CHARACTER*1000 STRING
.
.
CALL SUBNAM(STRING(1:72)
SUBROUTINE SYBNAM(STRING)
CHARACTER*(*) STRING
LEN(STRING) will be 72, not 1000

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