If you work in a data driven career, odds are you will at some point have to perform sorting on your data. Rather than writing your own sorting algorithm (which will most likely be far less efficient), Python provides a built-in function called sorted(). This function allows you to do basic sorting, such as arranging … Read more
Have you ever had a string and wanted to make it a certain length by adding zeros to it? You could type it out. But we’re programmers, we hate typing! Surely there must be a way to code this? To pad zeros to a string, use the str.zfill() method. It takes one argument: the final … Read more
Question: Is it possible to call a function inside a list comprehension statement? Background: List comprehension is a compact way of creating lists. The simple formula is [expression + context]. Expression: What to do with each list element? Context: What elements to select? The context consists of an arbitrary number of for and if statements. … Read more
The most Pythonic way to convert a list of floats fs to a list of integers is to use the one-liner fs = [int(x) for x in fs]. It iterates over all elements in the list fs using list comprehension and converts each list element x to an integer value using the int(x) constructor. This … Read more
In this article, you’ll learn the ultimate answer to the following question: How To Eliminate All The Whitespace From A String—on Both Ends, and In-Between Words? Summary: Use the string methods join(), split(), strip(), rstrip(), lstrip() and or replace()—in specific combinations—to remove any whitespace in a given string. The simplest way to remove all whitespaces … Read more
Summary: The slice notation list[::-1] with default start and stop indices and negative step size -1 reverses a given list. Problem: Given a list of elements. How to reverse the order of the elements in the list. Example: Say, you’ve got the following list: Your goal is to reverse the elements to obtain the following … Read more
To remove duplicates from a Python list while preserving the order of the elements, use the code list(dict.fromkeys(list)) that goes through two phases: (1) Convert the list to a dict using the dict.fromkeys() function with the list elements as keys and None as dict values. (2) Convert the dictionary back to a list using the … Read more
Problem: Given a list. How to access the last element of this list? Example: You have the list [‘Alice’, ‘Bob’, ‘Liz’] and you want to get the last element ‘Liz’. Quick solution: Use negative indexing -1. To access the last element of a Python list, use the indexing notation list[-1] with negative index -1 which … Read more
This is a running document in which I’ll answer all questions regarding the single line of Python code. It’s based on my interactive collection here but without the slow videos and embedded code shells. Let’s get started! Python One Line If Else You can use a simple if statement in a single line of code. … Read more
Summary: To access the index of iterables like lists in Python, use one of the following methods: Use enumerate() function. Use a counter variable with For Loop/While Loop. Use a list comprehension. Use the NumPy library. Use the itertools module. Introduction An index can be considered as the position of an element in an ordered … Read more
Python’s dictionary data structure is one of the most powerful, most underutilized data structures in Python. Why? Because checking membership is more efficient for dictionaries than for lists, while accessing elements is easier for dictionaries than for sets. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to perform four common dictionary operations in one line of Python … Read more
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