Joiners

Joiner is a type of Quoter that combines sequences. The simplest invocation join(mylist) is identical to ', '.join(mylist). But of course it doesn’t stop there. The sep parameter determines what string is placed between each list item. But the separator need not be uniform. For the common (and linguistically important) case where there are two items in list, the twosep parameter provides an alternate value. The final separator can be defined via the lastsep parameter, permitting proper Oxford commas, or if you prefer, a non-Oxford heathen style. The standard prefix, suffix, margin and padding parameters are available. Finally, individual sequence items can be formatted (quoter) and the entire “core” of joined material can be wrapped by an endcap quoter.

Some examples:

mylist = list("ABCD")
print join(mylist)
print join(mylist, sep=" | ", endcaps=braces)
print join(mylist, sep=" | ", endcaps=braces.but(padding=1))
print and_join(mylist)
print and_join(mylist[:2])
print and_join(mylist[:3])
print and_join(mylist, quoter=double, lastsep=" and ")

Yields:

A, B, C, D
{A | B | C | D}
{ A | B | C | D }
A and B
A, B, and C
A, B, C, and D
"A", "B", "C" and "D"

It’s a bit of a historical accident that both the prefix/suffix pair and endcap are available, as they accomplish the same goal. If an endcap quoter is used, note that any desired padding (spaces inside the endcaps) must be provided by the endcapper, as it operates earlier than, and in conflict with, the application of normal padding. E.g.:

print join(mylist, sep=" | ", endcaps=braces.but(padding=1))
print join(mylist, sep=" | ", prefix="{", suffix="}", padding=1)

Do the same thing. But mixing and matching the two styles may not give you what you wanted.

Various defined Joiner objects may be of use:: and_join, or_join, joinlines, and concat.