A profound understanding of Python lists is fundamental to your Python education. Today, I wondered: what’s the difference between two of the most-frequently used list methods: append() vs. extend()? I shot a small video explaining the difference and which method is faster—you can play it as you read over this tutorial: Here’s the short answer … Read more
The most important collection data type in Python is the list data type. You’ll use lists basically in all your future projects so take 3-5 minutes and study this short guide carefully. You can also play my short video tutorial as you read over the methods: Method Description lst.append(x) Appends element x to the list … Read more
The web is full of tutorials about regular expressions. But I realized that most of those tutorials lack a thorough motivation. Why do regular expressions exist? What are they used for? What are some practical applications? Somehow, the writers of those tutorials believe that readers are motivated by default to learn a technology that’s complicated … Read more
I’ve always struggled with the plt.imshow() method of Python’s matplotlib library. To help you and I master it, I’ve written the most in-depth resource about it on the web. As a bonus resource, you can play my walkthrough video that takes you through all the code in this article: To show an image in matplotlib, … Read more
This tutorial explains everything you need to know about matching groups in Python’s re package for regular expressions. You may have also read the term “capture groups” which points to the same concept. As you read through the tutorial, you can also watch the tutorial video where I explain everything in a simple way: Related … Read more
Morse code was developed in telecommunications to encode the alphabetic characters in binary signals (“long” and “short”, or “1” and “0”). Here’s the Morse code table: This tutorial shows you how to implement a simple Morse code translator in Python. You can also play the explainer video as you read through the article: The code … Read more
Ready to earn the black belt of your regex superpower? This tutorial shows you the subtle but important difference between greedy and non-greedy regex quantifiers. You can also watch the explainer video I created for this article: If you’re a busy person, here’s the short version of this tutorial: Definition Greedy Quantifier: A greedy quantifier … Read more
A code puzzle is an educative snippet of source code that teaches a single computer science concept by activating the learner’s curiosity and involving them in the learning process.
This tutorial makes you a master of character sets in Python. (I know, I know, it feels awesome to see your deepest desires finally come true.) As I wrote this article, I saw a lot of different terms describing this same powerful concept such as “character class“, “character range“, or “character group“. However, the most … Read more
A regular expression is a decades-old concept in computer science. Invented in the 1950s by famous mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene, the decades of evolution brought a huge variety of operations. Collecting all operations and writing up a comprehensive list would result in a very thick and unreadable book by itself. Related article: Python Regex Superpower … Read more
You may already know Python’s and operator when applied to two Booleans: Simple enough. Yet, that’s not the whole story: you can use the and operator even on complex data types such as lists or custom objects. So you may ask (and rightly so): What If You Apply the AND Operator To Two Objects? To … Read more
Python’s re module comes with a number of regular expression methods that help you achieve more with less. Related article: Python Regex Superpower – The Ultimate Guide Think of those methods as the framework connecting regular expressions with the Python programming language. Every programming language comes with its own way of handling regular expressions. For … Read more