Question

I tried following instructions:

>>> values ['9', '31', '32']
>>> map('abc'.join, values)
and got:
['9', '3abc1', '3abc2']

but i expected:

['abc9', 'abc31', 'abc32']

why am i mistaken?

Just for the record i circumvented it with:

>>> map(lambda x: 'abc%s' % x, values)

But i’m still puzzled by the behaviour of the 1st map-construct!

Thanks for all the insightful answers. They are all correct and helpful, so i had to threw the dice to choose which to accept – i would have accepted any of them 😉

Answer 1

This will call subsequently

'abc'.join('9')

which gives '9' since there is only one element in the given argument to join, then

'abc'.join('31')

since '31' is similar to ['3', '1'] the result is '3abc1' and so on.