This article will be about a topic that can be used across platforms, such as Linux, Windows and Mac.
The threading module was first introduced in Python 1.5.2 as an enhancement of the low-level thread module. The threading module makes working with threads much easier and allows the program to run multiple operations at once. Note that the threads in Python work best with I/O operations, such as downloading resources from the Internet or […]
Python 201: A Tutorial on Threads Read More »
The Bokeh package is an interactive visualization library that uses web browsers for its presentation. Its goal is to provide graphics in the vein of D3.js that look elegant and are easy to construct. Bokeh supports large and streaming datasets. You will probably be using this library for creating plots / graphs. One of its
Python: Visualization with Bokeh Read More »
The unittest module now includes a mock submodule as of Python 3.3. It will allow you to replace portions of the system that you are testing with mock objects as well as make assertions about how they were used. A mock object is used for simulating system resources that aren’t available in your test environment.
Python 201: An Intro to mock Read More »
I stumbled across another new library that purports that it is better than Python’s datetime module. It is called Pendulum. Pendulum is heavily influenced by Carbon for PHP according to its documentation. These libraries are always interesting, although I am not sure what makes this one better than Arrow or Delorean. There were some comments
Yet Another Python datetime Replacement: Pendulum Read More »
The urllib module in Python 3 is a collection of modules that you can use for working with URLs. If you are coming from a Python 2 background you will note that in Python 2 you had urllib and urllib2. These are now a part of the urllib package in Python 3. The current version
Python 101: An Intro to urllib Read More »
Redirecting stdout to something most developers will need to do at some point or other. It can be useful to redirect stdout to a file or to a file-like object. I have also redirected stdout to a text control in some of my desktop GUI projects. In this article we will look at the following:
Python 101: Redirecting stdout Read More »
Regular expressions are basically a tiny language all their own that you can use inside of Python and many other programming languages. You will often hear regular expressions referred to as “regex”, “regexp” or just “RE”. Some languages, such as Perl and Ruby, actually support regular expression syntax directly in the language itself. Python only
Python: An Intro to Regular Expressions Read More »
Python provides the importlib package as part of its standard library of modules. Its purpose is to provide the implementation to Python’s import statement (and the __import__() function). In addition, importlib gives the programmer the ability to create their own custom objects (AKA an importer) that can be used in the import process. What about
Python 201: An Intro to importlib Read More »
I’ve written about super briefly in the past, but decided to take another go at writing something more interesting about this particular Python function. The super built-in function was introduced way back in Python 2.2. The super function will return a proxy object that will delegate method calls to a parent or sibling class of
Python 201 – super Read More »
What does it mean to benchmark ones code? The main idea behind benchmarking or profiling is to figure out how fast your code executes and where the bottlenecks are. The main reason to do this sort of thing is for optimization. You will run into situations where you need your code to run faster because
Python 101: An Intro to Benchmarking your code Read More »
Python 3 doesn’t have very much in its standard library that deals with encryption. Instead, you get hashing libraries. We’ll take a brief look at those in the chapter, but the primary focus will be on the following 3rd party packages: PyCrypto and cryptography. We will learn how to encrypt and decrypt strings with both
Python 3: An Intro to Encryption Read More »
The other day I ran into a use case where I needed to communicate with a subprocess I had started but I needed it to timeout. Unfortunately, Python 2 does not have a way to timeout the communicate method call so it just blocks until it either returns or the process itself closes. There are
Python 101: How to timeout a subprocess Read More »
Python’s collections module has specialized container datatypes that can be used to replace Python’s general purpose containers. The one that we’ll be focusing on here is the namedtuple which you can use to replace Python’s tuple. Of course, the namedtuple is not a drop-in replacement as you will soon see. I have seen some programmers
Python 201: namedtuple Read More »
Earlier this week, I came across another fun package called datefinder. The idea behind this package is that it can take any string with dates in it and transform them into a list of Python datetime objects. I would have loved this package at my old job where I did a lot of text file
Python – The datefinder package Read More »
The other day, I came across this interesting experimental package called import_from_github_com. The package uses the new import hooks provided in PEP 302 to basically allow you to import a package from github. What the package actually appears to do is install the package and add it to locals. Anyway, you need Python 3.2 or
Python 3 – Import from github Read More »