Credit: Alex Martelli
Strings are immutable, so we need to make a
copy. A list is the right intermediate data structure, since it has a
reverse
method that does just what we want and works in place:
revchars = list(astring) # string -> list of chars revchars.reverse( ) # reverse the list in place revchars = ''.join(revchars) # list of strings -> string
To flip words, we just work with a list of words instead of a list of characters:
revwords = astring.split( ) # string -> list of words revwords.reverse( ) # reverse the list in place revwords = ' '.join(revwords) # list of strings -> string
Note that we use a ' '
(space) joiner
for the list of words, but a
''
(empty string) joiner for
the list of characters.
If you need to reverse by words while preserving untouched the intermediate whitespace, regular-expression splitting can be useful:
import re revwords = re.split(r'(s+)', astring) # separators too since '(...)' revwords.reverse( ) # reverse the list in place revwords = ''.join(revwords) # list of strings -> string
Note that the joiner becomes the empty string again in this case,
because the whitespace separators are kept in the
revwords
list by using re.split
with a regular expression that includes a parenthesized group.
The snippets in this recipe are fast, readable, and Pythonic.
However, some people have an inexplicable fetish for one-liners. If
you are one of those people, you need an auxiliary function (you can
stick it in your built-ins from
sitecustomize.py
) like this:
def reverse(alist): temp = alist[:] temp.reverse( ) return temp
or maybe this, which is messier and slower:
def reverse_alternative(alist): return [alist[i-1] for i in range(len(alist), 0, -1)]
This is, indeed, in-lineable, but not worth it in my opinion.
Anyway, armed with such an almost-built-in, you can now do brave new one-liners, such as:
revchars = ''.join(reverse(list(astring))) revwords = ' '.join(reverse(astring.split( )))
In the end, Python does not twist your arm to make you choose the obviously right approach: Python gives you the right tools, but it’s up to you to use them.