CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythongenerate-series
Vicknesh Kodak Manoselvam
Vicknesh Kodak Manoselvam

Reputation: 73

A cleaner way to generate a list of running IDs

I just made a function to generate a list of running ids between a given range. IDs begin with an alphabet and follow with 5 numbers (e.g. A00002). The function below works, but I was wondering if there was a cleaner way to do this. Thanks!

def running_ids(start, end):
list = []
start = int(start[1:])
end = int(end[1:])
steps = end - start

def zeros(n):
    zeros = 5 - len(str(n))
    return zeros

while start <= end:
    string = "A" + "0"*zeros(start) + str(start)
    list.append(string)
    start += 1

return list

print running_ids('A00001', 'A00005')

['A00001', 'A00002', 'A00003', 'A00004', 'A00005']

Upvotes: 0

Views: 341

Answers (4)

BlackMamba
BlackMamba

Reputation: 10252

def running_ids(start, end):
    t = start[0]
    low = int(start[1:])
    high = int(end[1:]) + 1
    res = []
    for x in range(low, high):
        res.append(t + '{0:05d}'.format(x))
    return res

print(running_ids('A00001', 'A00005'))

Upvotes: 0

Hooked
Hooked

Reputation: 88198

Use a generator. This way you can generate the numbers as needed and not store them all at once. It also maintains the state of your counter, useful if you start building large projects and you forget to add one to your index. It's a very powerful way of programming in Python:

def running_id():
    n = 1
    while True:
        yield 'A{0:05d}'.format(n)
        n += 1

C = running_id()
for n in xrange(5):
    print next(C)

Giving:

A00001
A00002
A00003
A00004
A00005

Upvotes: 3

thefourtheye
thefourtheye

Reputation: 239573

You can use the builtin format method

print "A" + format(1, "05d")   # A00001
print "A" + format(100, "05d") # A00100

Or you can use str.zfill method like this

print "A" + str(1).zfill(5)    # A00001
print "A" + str(100).zfill(5)  # A00100

Upvotes: 1

mgilson
mgilson

Reputation: 310049

You could just use simple builtin string formatting:

>>> 'A%05d'%1
'A00001'
>>> 'A{0:05d}'.format(1)
'A00001'

Upvotes: 3

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