Ytukyg

Is it possible to convert a string of ASCII characters from a list of strings:

[['You '], ['have '], ['made '], ['my '], ['day.']]

I understand that the conversion is done using ord(i) as explained here. I just can't seem to figure out how to retain the list of list structure after the conversion that reads something like this:

[[ 1, 2, 3 ], [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ], etc. ]

Thank you!

use list comprehension or maps to traverse into the inner elements and apply the ord function:

example:

# python 3 (py2 syntax slightly different)

x = [['You '], ['have '], ['made '], ['my '], ['day.']]

[list(map(ord, i[0])) for i in x]

# outputs

Out[41]:

[[89, 111, 117, 32],

 [104, 97, 118, 101, 32],

 [109, 97, 100, 101, 32],

 [109, 121, 32],

 [100, 97, 121, 46]]

You have two options:

• 
  

  Nest your list comprehension:

  
  
  

  [[ord(c) for c in nested[0]] for nested in outerlist]
  
  

  
  


• 
  

  In Python 3, you can encode the string to a bytes object, and convert that to a list. bytes objects are just sequences of integers, after all:

  
  
  

  [list(nested[0].encode('ascii')) for nested in outerlist]
  
  

  
  
  

  The Python 2 equivalent is to use the bytearray() type; for str (byte strings):

  
  
  

  [list(bytearray(nested[0])) for nested in outerlist]
  
  

  
  

In both cases I assume that your nested list contain just a single element each, a string.

Demo on Python 3.7:

>>> l = [['You '], ['have '], ['made '], ['my '], ['day.']]

>>> [[ord(c) for c in nested[0]] for nested in l]

[[89, 111, 117, 32], [104, 97, 118, 101, 32], [109, 97, 100, 101, 32], [109, 121, 32], [100, 97, 121, 46]]

>>> [list(nested[0].encode('ascii')) for nested in l]

[[89, 111, 117, 32], [104, 97, 118, 101, 32], [109, 97, 100, 101, 32], [109, 121, 32], [100, 97, 121, 46]]