Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

[elfs]

Sometimes, what I do feels like incantation. I wanted a word count on my "working directory" displays, which I maintain using python scripts. Once upon a time, this would have taken me a few lines. Maybe ten or so. And then I learned Ruby. I learned the difference between a fold, a filter, and a transform. And I learned when to do which.

def wc(f): return Numeric.sum([len(i.split()) for i in open(f, "r") if i])

I don't get paid enough for knowing this stuff.

Comments

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I used the Numeric module because it was the first one for which I found documentation. If there's a builtin sum, it's not in my Python reference (which is, admittedly, the New Riders book covering version 2.1).

You're right that the count is broken because of the 'if i' chunk. It doesn't do what I intended it to do (remove nulls caused by splits across multiple whitespaces).

And yes, there are generators in python and they completely rock. In fact, I've written Python-to-HTML and Python-to-JSON that silently swallow generators and functors, calling them directly and further interpreting their output. It's damn near DWIM code.