one time loop

[Skaperen]

there are 3 phases. the first is to check the arguments for types and errors and convert the various types to a common form (a list or tuple of ints), in a few cases it does a recursive call to itself and returns instead of going on to phase 2. the one-time loop only applies to phase 1. phase 3 takes that common form and returns the data to the caller in a form much like what it was called with. there are 4 of these, each for different kinds of data conversion. but i can't just make a simple common pattern since the data setup does vary somewhat with the type of conversion being done. these conversions are unicode to utf8, utf8 to unicode (because what python3 has is too limited), and encode+decode of variant escape sequences (a lot more than what python provides). there are somother data conversions i'm considering.

yes, there really are other ways to organize this. but maintaining a single direction of flow and avoiding extreme nesting depth helps people see what is going on. the way i am doing it meets my goal.