[reportlab-users] Re: Philosophy on validation

[Andy Robinson]

> So, back-peddling from my previous position, perhaps all that's really needed
> are a couple utility methods (and associated documentation) to perform some of
> those scalar operations we normally see for images to these text arrays.  If
> the user wants a particular formatting, then they can apply it prior to
> passing it to the RL methods.
> 
> So, in short, I take it all back, out, and put it somewhere else :)
> -B

I once wrote a library of such routines for data cleanup and 
manipulation; wish I'd cleaned it up and got it released.  Chris Tismer 
then went on to write a better one and used it to clean gargantuan 
numbers of medical databases before he went Stackless.  Basically we had 
a Dataset object whch wrapped a 2d array, and methods to let you 
manipulate it row-wise, column-wise, group, transpose and do useful 
things with friendly names.


If we ever get a messy data-cleaning project, I'll clone it and add it 
to the ReportLab library, as I have not seen a Python project like it, 
and data cleanup and preparation is a common thread in our work.  It 
could be much cooler now with some of the features in modern Python.

- Andy