Recently I needed the ability to use Reportlab’s flowables, but place them in fixed locations. Some of you are probably wondering why I would want to do that. The nice thing about flowables, like the Paragraph, is that they’re easily styled. If I could bold something or center something AND put it in a fixed […]
Reportlab: Mixing Fixed Content and Flowables Read More »
The other day I saw a question on StackOverflow about how to dynamically destroy and create panels after a certain amount of time has passed. I told the fellow that he could use the examples from one of my blog articles where I destroyed and created buttons, but the dude just didn’t get it. So
wxPython: Making a panel self-destruct Read More »
I meant to write up a post on this within a week of reading about it, but then things got busy and I forgot. Anyway, there’s a new widget in the wxPython toolkit called the ShortcutEditor. You can read about it on the wxPython mailing list. You’ll probably have to update the agw lib folder
The New ShortcutEditor for wxPython Read More »
Most computer users of this day and age use drag and drop (DnD) instinctively. You probably used it to transfer some files from one folder to another this week! The wxPython GUI toolkit provides drag and drop functionality baked in. In this tutorial, we’ll see just how easy it is to implement!
wxPython: Introduction to Drag and Drop Read More »
The other day I was asked if there was a way to sort a dictionary by value. If you use Python regularly, then you know that the dictionary data structure is by definition an unsorted mapping type. Some would define a dict as a hash table. Regardless, I needed a way to sort a nested
Python 201: How to sort a dictionary by value Read More »
There are several cool ways to create PDFs with Python. In this article we will be focusing on a cool little tool called rst2pdf, which takes a text file that contains Restructured Text and converts it to a PDF. The rst2pdf package requires Reportlab to function. This won’t be a tutorial on Restructured Text, although
An Intro to rst2pdf – Changing Restructured Text into PDFs with Python Read More »
I didn’t think I’d do one of these link roundups this week, but I decided to go for it anyway. In fact, I found a cool little tool for obtaining information about installed Python packages and querying packages available on PyPI (Python Package Index) called yolk too! Anyway, here’s this week’s reading list. I hope
Weekly Python Links Roundup (6/15/2012) Read More »
There are several code analysis tools for Python. The most well known is pylint. Then there’s pychecker and now we’re moving on to pyflakes. The pyflakes project is a part of something known as the Divmod Project. Pyflakes doesn’t actually execute the code it checks, unlike pychecker. Of course, pylint also doesn’t execute the code.
pyflakes – the passive checker of Python programs Read More »
Python code analysis can be a heavy subject, but it can be very helpful in making your programs better. There are several Python code analyzers that you can use to check your code and see if they conform to standards. pylint is probably the most popular. It’s very configurable, customizable and pluggable too. It also
PyLint: Analyzing Python Code Read More »
Today we’ll spend some time looking at three different ways to make Python submit a web form. In this case, we will be doing a web search with duckduckgo.com searching on the term “python” and saving the result as an HTML file. We will use Python’s included urllib modules and two 3rd party packages: requests
Python 101: How to submit a web form Read More »
This week there were several fun things to read about in the Python ecosystem. You can read about a cool new Mercurial mirror of the Python repo, discover simple queues with redis and learn how to take an SQL statement and reverse engineer it into SQLAlchemy code. I’m not sure why you’d do that last
Weekly Python Links Roundup (6/8/2012) Read More »
Downloading files from the internet is something that almost every programmer will have to do at some point. Python provides several ways to do just that in its standard library. Probably the most popular way to download a file is over HTTP using the urllib or urllib2 module. Python also comes with ftplib for FTP
Python 101: How to Download a File Read More »
A couple years ago I started a series of articles on XML parsing. I covered lxml’s etree and Python’s included minidom XML parsing library. For whatever reason I didn’t notice lxml’s objectify sub-package, but I saw it recently and decided I should check it out. To my mind, the objectify module seems to be even
Parsing XML with Python using lxml.objectify Read More »
I was recently contacted about whether or not there were any wxPython applications out here that could present a SQLite database. As I understood it, they wanted to be able to introspect the database and view the tables, probably using the wx.grid.Grid widget. I find the Grid widget to be very powerful and also rather
wxPython and SQLAlchemy: Loading Random SQLite Databases for Viewing Read More »
It may have been a better idea to have called this this article “How to Convert Floats to Words”, but since I’m talking about currency, I thought using Decimal was more accurate. Anyway, a couple years ago, I wrote about how to convert numbers to Python. The main reason I’m revisiting this topic is because
How to Convert Decimal Numbers to Words with Python Read More »