How would you translate this from Perl to Python?

Question

I\'ve got a Perl function which takes a timestamp and returns either the unchanged timestamp (if it\'s never seen it before) or otherwise, it appends some letters to make it uni

Answer 1

Does the suffix have to be letters like that?

from itertools import count
def unique(timestamp): 
  if timestamp in unique.ts.keys():
    return timestamp + '.' + str(unique.ts[timestamp].next())
  else:
    unique.ts[timestamp] = count()
    return timestamp
unique.ts = {}

You can define a different count if you want the letters back.

This isn't the same as your perl code, though.

• It keeps a dict around so if you have lots of unique timestamps then you'll use lots of memory.
• It handles out of order calls, which the original doesn't (i.e. u(1), u(2), u(1)).