Question

I know that in Python this is possible:

'\n'.join(alist)

Assuming the ‘alist’ is a list of urls, can I output an HTML string which will produce a list of href tags, something like this

'<a href="'.join(alist)

I know the above is wrong, but I was wondering if there was a smarter way to do this. I have done the following with works:

for u in adict[alist]:
    fileHandle.write('<a href="' + u + '">' + u + '</a><br>')       

Basically, is there a way of somehow replacing the above for loop with a join statement? A one-liner perhaps?

Answer 1

You’re looking for a generator expression:

''.join('<a href="' + u + '">' + u + '</a><br/>' for u in adict[alist])

If you don’t want a <br/> after the last item, move the <br/> into the string to join with.

Also, I’m assuming here adict[alist] contains HTML code. If it contains text, you must wrap u with html.escape() (replacing < with < and " with "). Otherwise, you’re introducing a Cross-Site scripting vulnerability (and rendering bugs).