The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup format originally for XML. Some companies use XML as a data serialization format or for configuration. Recently, I needed to learn how to uncomment some lines in an XML file to enable some settings that were defined in the XML. Fortunately, Python’s xml module provides a way […]
Parsing XML Comments with Python Read More »
Text-based user interfaces (TUIs) are making a BIG comeback. Many developers of today need to easy-to-use applications to configure and run jobs on headless servers. You can make your own life and the lives of your team so much easier by learning how to create a TUI yourself. Textual is a rapid application development framework
Creating TUI Applications with Textual and Python Kickstarter Launched Read More »
Many programs require configuration. Most have a default configuration and many allow the user to adjust that configuration. There are many different types of configuration files. Some use text files while others use databases. Python has a standard library called configparser that you can use to work with Microsoft Windows INI files. In this tutorial,
Python 101 – An Intro to Working with INI files Using configparser Read More »
I recently needed to figure out how to write an updater script for a project I was working on. The application is released on an internal GitHub page with compressed files and an executable. I needed a way to check the latest release artifacts in GitHub and download them. Let’s find out how all this
How to Download the Latest Release Assets from GitHub with Python Read More »
I am running a Spring sale on all my currently published Python books. You can get 25% off any of my complete books by using this code at checkout: MSON4QP Learn Python Today! I have books on the following topics: Basic Python Intermediate Python Python and PDFs Python and Excel Image Processing with Python
ANN: Spring Python eBook Sale 2025 Read More »
Textual is an excellent Python package for creating beautiful user interfaces in your terminal. By default, Textual will arrange your widgets starting at the top of the screen and appending them in a vertically oriented stack. Each GUI or TUI toolkit provides a way to lay out your widgets. Textual is no different in this
Textual – How to Add Widgets to a Container Read More »
The Screen is a container for your widgets. These screens occupy the dimensions of your terminal by default. While you can have many different screens in a single application, only one screen may be active at a time. When you create your App class, Textual will create a screen object implicitly. Yes, Textual requires you to have at
Textual – Switching Screens in Your Terminal Read More »
You can use many great tools to help you in your software development journey. One such tool is pre-commit, a framework for managing and maintaining multi-language pre-commit hooks. You use pre-commit to run one or more tools before allowing you to commit your code locally. For example, you might run the Flake8 linter or the Ruff formatter
An Intro to pre-commit Read More »
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas from me to you! I have been giving away hundreds of Python books and courses for Christmas for the last couple of years! From now until Christmas, I will be giving away hundreds more. You can start learning Python for free using my books or courses. All you have to
The Python Countdown to Christmas 2024 Giveaway Read More »
When you are working on your personal or work projects in Python, you usually want to have a way to enforce code standards. You can use tools like Flake8, PyLint or Ruff to lint your code. You might use Mypy to verify type checking. There are lots of other tools at your disposal. But it
Checking Python Code with GitHub Actions Read More »
JupyterLab, the latest iteration of the Jupyter Notebook, is a versatile tool that empowers you to share your code in an easily understandable format. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Jupyter Notebooks or variations of the Notebook architecture for any or all of the following: teaching presentations learning a computer language numerical
JupyterLab 101 Book is Now Available Read More »
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are nearly here, so it’s time to do a Python sale! All my books and courses are 35% off until December 4th if you use this code: BF24 at checkout. You can learn about any of the following topics in my books and courses: Basic Python (Python 101) PDF Processing
Black Friday Python Deals 2024 Read More »
Textual is a great Python package for creating a lightweight, powerful, text-based user interface. That means you can create a GUI in your terminal with Python without learning curses! But what happens when you encounter some problems that require debugging your application? A TUI takes over your terminal, which means you cannot see anything from
How to Debug Your Textual Application Read More »
Textual-cogs is a collection of Textual dialogs that you can use in your Textual application. You can see a quick demo of the dialogs below: Dialogs included so far: Generic MessageDialog – shows messages to the user SaveFileDialog – gives the user a way to select a location to save a file SingleChoiceDialog – gives the user a series
ANN – The textual-cogs Package – Creating Reusable Dialogs for Textual Read More »
Reading and writing files is a basic task that most software applications need to do. You will also find that you sometimes need to read and write files to a remote machine or perhaps run commands on a remote machine as well. Python is well-suited for this type of activity using tools such as Paramiko.
SSH Scripting with Fabric and Python Read More »