s.join(a) concatenates all items in the sequence a by the string s, for example,
>>> ','.join(['foo', 'bar', '', 'baz'])
'foo,bar,,baz'
Note that .join can only join string sequences. It won't call str automatically.
>>> ''.join([1,2,3,4])
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
TypeError: sequence item 0: expected string, int found
Therefore we need to first map all items into strings first.