Every now and then you’ll find yourself needing to load modules or classes dynamically. In other words, you’ll want to be able to import a module without knowing ahead of time which one you’re going to import. In this article, we’ll look at two ways to accomplish this feat in Python. Using the __import__ Magic […]
Advanced Python – How to Dynamically Load Modules or Classes Read More »
List comprehensions in Python are very handy. They can also be a little hard to understand when and why you would use them. List comprehensions tend to be harder to read than just using a simple for loop as well. We’ll spend some time looking at how to construct list comprehensions and learn how they
Python 201: List Comprehensions Read More »
Today we’re going to take a look at Tkinter! I was curious about how one would go about hiding a frame and then re-showing it using Tkinter and I kept finding threads (like this one) that talked about using withdraw() and deiconify() but didn’t really provide any usable code. In wxPython, I did this sort
Tkinter: How to Show / Hide a Window Read More »
Today on StackOverflow I saw someone wondering how to bind two functions / methods to the same event in wxPython. It’s really quite easy. Here’s one example:
wxPython: How to Fire Multiple Event Handlers Read More »
Mercurial is a free, distributed source control versioning tool, similar to git or bazaar. Some might even compare it CVS or Subversion (SVN), although those are not distributed versioning systems. The Python programming core development team chose to switch to Mercurial from SVN a couple years ago and many other high profile 3rd party Python
An Intro to Mercurial Read More »
While researching PDF libraries for Python, I stumbled across another little project called metaPDF. According to its website, metaPDF is a lightweight Python library optimized for metadata extraction and insertion, and it is a fast wrapper over the excellent pyPdf library. It works by quickly searching the last 2048 bytes of the PDF before parsing
Python PDF Series – An Intro to metaPDF Read More »
Some teens from around the world decided to learn Python using Raspberry Pi to write a game during a sprint starting today and running through tomorrow. They are taking donations to give to the Raspberry Pi foundation too. You can follow their live stream if you want to. Raspberry Pi is an ARM GNU/Linux box
Raspithon starts today! Read More »
There are lots of different ways to download a file from the internet using Python. One popular way is to connect to an FTP server and download your files that way. So that is what we will be looking at in this article. All you need is your standard installation of Python. It includes a
Python 101: Downloading a File with ftplib Read More »
SQLite is a self-contained, server-less, config-free transactional SQL database engine. Python gained the sqlite3 module all the way back in version 2.5 which means that you can create SQLite database with any current Python without downloading any additional dependencies. Mozilla uses SQLite databases for its popular Firefox browser to store bookmarks and other various pieces
Python: A Simple Step-by-Step SQLite Tutorial Read More »
Note: The following post was originally published over on Dzone. I changed the title because I already wrote several XML parsing articles and don’t want my readers to get this one confused with the others. One of the common tasks I am given in my day job is to take some data format input and
Parsing XML and Creating a PDF Invoice with Python Read More »
Occasionally I’ll see someone on the wxPython users group ask about how to make the wx.Notebook change pages (or tabs) programmatically. So I decided it was about time I figured it out. Here is some code that works for me: import random import wx ######################################################################## class TabPanel(wx.Panel): #———————————————————————- def __init__(self, parent, page): “””””” wx.Panel.__init__(self, parent=parent)
wxPython: How to Programmatically Change wx.Notebook Pages Read More »
Virtual environments can be really handy for testing software. That’s true in programming circles too. Ian Bicking created the virtualenv project, which is a tool for creating isolated Python environments. You can use these environments to test out new versions of your software, new versions of packages you depend on or just as a sandbox
Getting Started with virtualenv Read More »
Pip Installs Python or pip is a tool for installing and managing Python packages, many of which are on the Python Package Index (PyPI). It is a replacement of easy_install. In this article, we’ll spend a little time trying out pip to see how it works and how it might help us in our Python
Python 101: pip – a replacement for easy_install Read More »
This week, I came across a fun Python project named psutil on Google Code. It says it works on Linux, Windows, OSX and FreeBSD. What it does is grab all the running processes and gives you information on them and also gives you the ability to terminate them. So I thought it would be fun
wxPython: Creating Your Own Cross Platform Process Monitor with psutil Read More »
Today we’re going to take a look at the controversial easy_install method of installing Python modules and packages. We will also learn how to create our own *.egg files. You will need to go get the SetupTools package to follow along. This package doesn’t support Python 3.x so if you need that, see pip or
Python 101: easy_install or how to create eggs Read More »