Question

Maybe there was a better way to do this, but I have a list of mixed elements:

outlist = [10, [ETSc, Juniper Hairstreak], [ETSc, Spotted Turtle],
           [ETSc, Blanding's Turtle], IWWH]

What I would like to do is iterate over this list and if the list element contains ETSc, then I want to convert it to a string like this:

ETSc (Juniper Hairstreak)

If it doesn’t contain ETSc then I just want to convert it to a string:

IWWH

Ultimately the strings will populate a variable in an access database table. But I have no idea how to tell Python to find the list elements containing ETSc, since some of the elements are lists within a list and some are just strings.

Any help is greatly appreciated!!

Answer 1

Something like this, using a list comprehension:

>>> input = [10, ["ETSc", "Juniper Hairstreak"], ["ETSc", "Spotted Turtle"], ["ETSc", "Blanding's Turtle"], "IWWH"]
>>> output = [elt[0] + " (" + elt[1] + ")" if type(elt) == list and elt[0] == "ETSc" else str(elt) for elt in input]
>>> output
['10', 'ETSc (Juniper Hairstreak)', 'ETSc (Spotted Turtle)', "ETSc (Blanding's Turtle)", 'IWWH']

---

As @julio commented, you could make this more readable using a function:

def xform(elt):
    if type(elt) == list and len(elt) > 1 and elt[0] == "ETSc":
        return elt[0] + " (" + elt[1] + ")"
    else:
        return str(elt)

output = [xform(elt) for elt in input]