Python list comprehension query

Question

result = ['袁惟仁', None, 'Life']
# Replace None with empty string
response = ['' if s is None else s for s in result]
# Handle non-ascii characters
return [s.encode('utf-8') if isinstance(s, unicode) else str(s) for s in response]

In this code I'm replacing None values of list with '', then I handle Unicode characters. This works fine, but want to know if there is a better way to do it. Right now if I don't handle empty I get an error saying can't convert None to str.

Answer 1

Same result you may get via using or with list comprehension expression as:

>>> result = ['袁惟仁', None, 'Life']

>>> [r or '' for r in result]
['\xe8\xa2\x81\xe6\x83\x9f\xe4\xbb\x81', '', 'Life']

BTW, I don't get the part why you are explicitly doing .encode('utf-8') .

Answer 2

filter(None, result) will remove any None s from the list:

filter(None, result)
['\xe8\xa2\x81\xe6\x83\x9f\xe4\xbb\x81', 'Life']