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

Quite similar to Ali A, but I'll post mine anyway:

class unique_timestamp:
    suffixes = " ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
    def __init__(self):
        self.previous_timestamps = {}
        pass
    def uniquify(self, timestamp):
        times_seen_before = self.previous_timestamps.get(timestamp, 0)
        self.previous_timestamps[timestamp] = times_seen_before + 1
        if times_seen_before > 0:
            return str(timestamp) + self.suffixes[times_seen_before]
        else:
            return str(timestamp)

Usage:

>>> u = unique_timestamp()
>>> u.uniquify(1)
'1'
>>> u.uniquify(1)
'1A'
>>> u.uniquify(1)
'1B'
>>> u.uniquify(2)
'2'