Can you believe it? People use unknown and potentially insecure websites to generate their random passwords! This works as follows: A website generates a “random” password for them and they copy&paste it and assume this is a safe password because of the randomness of the characters. What a security flaw! Why? Because the website could … Read more
It’s quite common for your code to throw a typeerror, especially if you’re just starting out with Python. The reason for this is that the interpreter expects variables of certain types in certain places in the code. We’ll look at a specific example of such an error: “typeerror: ‘int’ object is not iterable”. Exercise: Run … Read more
Summary: f-string is more readable and easier to implement than % and .format() string formatting styles. Furthermore, using f-strings is suggested for Python 3.6 and above while .format() is best suited for Python 2.6 and above. Versions prior to Python 2.6 only provide % option for string formatting. In terms of speed, % is the … Read more
A generator function is a Pythonic way to create an iterable without explicitly storing it in memory. This reduces memory usage of your code without incurring any additional costs. The following code shows a function get_numbers(n) that returns a list of n random numbers. However, this is not very efficient code because you create a … Read more
Problem: How to calculate the entropy with the SciPy library? Solution: Import the entropy() function from the scipy.stats module and pass the probability and the base of the logarithm into it. Try It Yourself: Run this code in the interactive code shell! Exercise: Change the probabilities. How does the entropy change? Let’s start slowly! You’ll … Read more
Problem: How to match dollar amounts in a given string? If cent amounts are given, those should match as well. Solution: You can use regular expression pattern ‘(\$[0-9]+(.[0-9]+)?)’ to find all numbers that start with a dollar symbol, followed by an arbitrary number of numerical digits, followed by an optional decimal point and an arbitrary … Read more
To update a global variable in one line of Python, retrieve the global variable dictionary with the globals() function, and access the variable by passing the variable name as a string key such as globals()[‘variable’]. Then overwrite the global variable using the equal symbol, for example in globals()[‘variable’] = 42 to overwrite the variable with … Read more
Summary: To split a string and keep the delimiters/separators you can use one of the following methods: Problem Formulation 🔏Problem: Given a string in Python; how to split the string and also keep the separators/delimiter? A sequence of one or more characters used to separate two or more parts of a given string or a … Read more
This tutorial is a chapter excerpt drafted for my new book “Python One-Liners” (to appear in 2020, No Starch Press, San Francisco). Are you an office worker, student, software developer, manager, blogger, researcher, author, copywriter, teacher, or self-employed freelancer? Most likely, you are spending many hours in front of your computer, day after day. In … Read more
Wouldn’t reading code be much easier if the author constantly shared their thoughts with you? Commenting is good practice in Python because it helps others (and your future self) understanding your code much better. Writing commented code makes you more productive in the long term! There are two types of comments: one-line comments and multi-line … Read more
When you’re learning and working with Python, you’re going to encounter errors and there’s no getting around that fact. So how do you get around them? It helps to learn about the errors. We’re going to take the opportunity to learn one of them today. What is “Keyboard Interrupt”? This is an error that you’re … Read more
Do you hate those lengthy class definitions with __init__ and too many whitespaces and newlines? Python One-Liners to the rescue! Luckily, you can create classes in a single line—and it can even be Pythonic to do so! Sounds too good to be true? Let’s dive right into it! Problem: How to create a Python class … Read more