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

I just tested this up to 1000 against the original perl implementation and diff returns the same results for both. The suffix code is tricky -- this is not a base 36 counter. Hasen J's solution - though it produces a unique timestamp - isn't quite the same since it goes from 'Z' to 'BA', when it should instead go to 'AA' to match the perl ++ operator.

#!/usr/bin/python

class uniqify:
    def __init__(self):
        self.last_timestamp = -1
        self.next_suffix = 'A'
        return

    def suffix(self):
        s = self.next_suffix
        letters = [l for l in self.next_suffix]
        if letters[-1] == 'Z':
            letters.reverse()
            nonz = None
            for i in range(len(letters)):
                if letters[i] != 'Z':
                    nonz = i
                    break
            if nonz is not None:
                letters[nonz] = chr(ord(letters[nonz]) + 1)
                for i in range(0, nonz):
                    letters[i] = 'A'
            else:
                letters = ['A'] * (len(letters) + 1)
            letters.reverse()
        else:
            letters[-1] = chr(ord(letters[-1]) + 1)

        self.next_suffix = ''.join(letters)
        return s

    def reset(self):
        self.next_suffix = 'A'
        return

    def __call__(self, timestamp):
        if timestamp == self.last_timestamp:
            timestamp_str = '%s%s' % (timestamp, self.suffix())
        else:
            self.last_timestamp = timestamp
            self.reset()
            timestamp_str = '%s' % timestamp

        return timestamp_str

uniqify = uniqify()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    for n in range(1000):
        print uniqify(1)
    for n in range(1000):
        print uniqify(2)