Python join why is it string join list instead of list join string

Question

This has always confused me. It seems like this would be nicer:

my_list = ["Hello", "world"]

print my_list.join("-")

# Produce: "Hello-world"

Than this:

my_list = ["Hello", "world"]

print "-".join(my_list)

# Produce: "Hello-world"

Is there a specific reason it is like this?

Answer 1

This is because join is a "string" method! It creates a string from any iterable. If we stuck the method on lists, what about when we have iterables that aren't lists?

What if you have a tuple of strings? If this were a list method, you would have to cast every such iterator of strings as a list before you could join the elements into a single string! For example:

some_strings = ('foo', 'bar', 'baz')

Let's roll our own list join method:

class OurList(list): def join(self, s): return s.join(self)

And to use it, note that we have to first create a list from each iterable to join the strings in that iterable, wasting both memory and processing power:

>>> l = OurList(some_strings)

# step 1, create our list

>>> l.join(', ')

# step 2, use our list join method! 'foo, bar, baz'

So we see we have to add an extra step to use our list method, instead of just using the builtin string method:

>>> ' | '.join(some_strings)

# a single step!

'foo | bar | baz'