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Stephen Van Dahm

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Cool Python Function

Posted by Stephen on October 3, 2006 in Programming, Stuff

I’m not sure that others would find this interesting, but I’m posting it anyway in case I need this later. While working on a Python script, I needed something that would generate the proper suffixes to make ordinal numbers like 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. Since some markup schemes allow you make the suffix a superscript, I wanted a function that only generates the suffix, so that I can use the function with multiple markup conventions. I poked around in the module documentation and didn’t find anything useful, so I wrote this:

def get_suffix(num):

    special_suffixes = { '1': 'st', '2': 'nd', '3': 'rd' }
    default_return = 'th'

    digits = str(abs(num)) # To work with negative numbers
    last_digit = digits[-1:]

    if last_digit in special_suffixes.keys():
        # Numbers that end in 11, 12, and 13 just get 'th'
        if len(digits) == 1 or digits[-2] != '1':
            default_return = special_suffixes[last_digit]

    return default_return

Short and easy.