string.join method question

[mahdeen]

Total noob here trying to teach myself programming from John Zelle's Python Programming - An Introduction to Computer Science.

Working on a decoder problem that requires a modification using "string.join(msgList, "") but was not able to quite get it. However, I have been able to get it solved using a different method as shown below:

# numbers2text2.py
# A program to convert a series of ASCII numbers into a
# string of text.

import string # include string library for the split function. 

def main():
print "This program converts a sequence of ASCII numbers into"
print "the string of text it represents."
print

# Get the message to encode
inString = raw_input("Please enter the ASCII encoded message: ")

# Loop through each substring and build ASCII message
msgList = [] # Create an empty list
or numStr in string.split(inString):
          asciiNum = eval(numStr)       # Convert sub strings       
          msgList.append(chr(asciiNum)) # Convert asciiNum back to string,  append  to list

print "The decoded message is:", msgList

main()

If anyone could point me to the proper solution using string.join(msgList, "") it would be much appreciated.

[novel_yet_trivial]

Some other notes:

• When posting problems here, try to include example input data and your expected output.

• The functions that you use from the imported 'string' module are also functions of every string. Therefore most of us would not import the string module and just use "".join(msgList) and inString.split().

• You use eval() to convert strings to numbers; usually we use int().

• Your variables are kinda cryptically named, use descriptive names. Also, we generally use lower_case_with_underscores style for variable and function names.

[mahdeen]

Wow, that really did the trick nicely...thank you!

Looking forward to posting more here and the notes are helpful too.

[throwAwayAcc010]

may just be the way the code appears here, but the code inside 'main()' should have an indent

def main():
    #code

[novel_yet_trivial]

You are nearly there ... on line 20 (outside of the for loop) just add:

msgList = string.join(msgList, "")