Method chaining#

Often, you need to perform several operations with data, for example:

In [1]: line = "switchport trunk allowed vlan 10,20,30"

In [2]: words = line.split()

In [3]: words
Out[3]: ['switchport', 'trunk', 'allowed', 'vlan', '10,20,30']

In [4]: vlans_str = words[-1]

In [5]: vlans_str
Out[5]: '10,20,30'

In [6]: vlans = vlans_str.split(",")

In [7]: vlans
Out[7]: ['10', '20', '30']

In the script:

line = "switchport trunk allowed vlan 10,20,30"
words = line.split()
vlans_str = words[-1]
vlans = vlans_str.split(",")
print(vlans)

In this case, variables are used to store the intermediate result and subsequent methods/actions are performed with the variable. This is a completely normal version of the code, especially at first when it’s hard perceive more complex expressions.

However, in Python, there are often expressions in which actions or methods are applied one after the other in one expression. For example, the previous code could be written like this:

line = "switchport trunk allowed vlan 10,20,30"
vlans = line.split()[-1].split(",")
print(vlans)

Since there are no expressions in parentheses that would indicate the priority of execution, everything is executed from left to right.

First, line.split() is executed - we get the list, then to the resulting list applies [-1] - we get the last element of the list, the line 10,20,30. The method split(",") is applied to this line and as a result we get the list ['10', '20', '30'].

The main nuance when writing such chains, the previous method/action should return something what the next method/action is waiting for. And it is imperative that something is returned, otherwise there will be an error.