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In need of a binge-and-purge idiom

Jeremy Fincher tweedgeezer at hotmail.com
Mon Mar 24 02:04:19 EST 2003 
mlh at furu.idi.ntnu.no (Magnus Lie Hetland) wrote in message news:<slrnb7ruo9.4ip.mlh at furu.idi.ntnu.no>...
> I've noticed that I use the following in several contexts:
> 
>   chunk = []
>   for element in iterable:
>       if isSeparator(element) and chunk:
>           doSomething(chunk)
>           chunk = []
>   if chunk:
>       doSomething(chunk)
>       chunk = []
> 
> If the iterable above is a file, isSeparator(element) is simply
> defined as not element.strip() and doSomething(chunk) is
> yield(''.join(chunk)) you have a paragraph splitter. I've been using
> the same approach for slightly more complicated parsing recently.

Maybe something like this can work?

def itersplit(iterable, isSeparator):
    acc = []
    for element in iterable:
        if isSeparator(element):
            yield acc
            acc = []
        else:
            acc.append(element)
    yield acc


Then your paragraph splitter might look like this:

def paragraphSplitter(file):
    for L in itersplit(file, lambda s: not s.split()):
        yield ''.join(L)

Jeremy
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