[Python-Dev] str with base (original) (raw)

Alex Martelli aleaxit at gmail.com
Thu Jan 19 03:16:03 CET 2006

On Jan 18, 2006, at 11:09 AM, Brett Cannon wrote:

On 1/18/06, Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at verizon.net> wrote:

I'd propose bin() to stay in line with the short abbreviated names.

There has been some previous discussion about removing hex()/oct() from builtins for Python 3.0, IIRC. I sure don't think bin() belongs there. Perhaps introduce a single function, base(val, radix=10, prefix=''), as a universal base converter that could replace bin(), hex(), oct(), etc. That would give us fewer builtins and provide an inverse for all the int() conversions (i.e. arbitrary bases). Also, it would allow an unprefixed output which is what I usually need. +1. Differs from Neal's format() function by not magically determining the prefix from the radix which I like.

I'm not sure I see the advantage of, say,

print base(x, radix=2, prefix='0b')

versus

print '0b'+base(x, radix=2)

IOW, if the prefix needs to be explicitly specified anyway, what's
the advantage of specifying it as an argument to base, rather than
just string-concatenating it?

Apart from that quibble, the base function appears to cover all the
use cases for my proposed str-with-base, so, since it appears to
attract less arguments, I'm definitely +1 on it.

Alex

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