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PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

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I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

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by Paul Bissex
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Python one-liner of the day

This is a function that takes an integer and returns its ordinal representation, e.g. "1st" for 1 and so on.

It's not the most readable thing, but once I saw the pieces falling into place I couldn't help myself. Repetition of the "th" literal is the only thing that bugs me. Oh well.

ord_text = lambda n: "%d%s" % (n, "th" if 10 < n % 100 < 14 else {1:"st", 2:"nd", 3:"rd"}.get(n % 10, "th"))

Comes with a one-line test suite!

for t in "1st 2nd 3rd 4th 11th 12th 13th 21st 22nd 23rd 111th 112th 113th".split(): assert(ord_text(int(t[:-2])) == t)

Thursday, April 24th, 2008
+
7 comments

Comment from Matt Tarbit, later that day

I think you might need to add 111th, 112th and 113th to the string in your test suite.

(Can't be certain though because I get a SyntaxError when trying to run your one-liner in python 2.3.4)

Comment from Paul, later that day

Excelllent catch, Matt, thanks! Fixed.

And yes, I should have mentioned that this is Python 2.5+ only, due to the ternary logic.

Comment from Reggie Drake, later that day

Unfortunately, your one-liner is so desirous to be a one-liner that on my resolution it reaches way out of the central column of your layout and past the 'Atom feed' link.

Comment from Leo Petr, later that day

Great! Now add internationalization for Russian, Swahili, and Chinese.

Comment from Paul, later that day

I knew that was coming.

I'll need a couple more lines.

Comment from kbob, later that day

Here's a version that eliminates the repeated "th" AND runs in both Python 2.3 and 2.5.

ord_text = lambda n: str(n) + {1: 'st', 2: 'nd', 3: 'rd'}.get(n % (10 < n % 100 < 14 or 10), 'th')

Comment from Jason Davies, 2 days later

Nice.

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