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 »
The unittest module is actually a testing framework that was originally inspired by JUnit. It currently supports test automation, the sharing of setup and shutdown code, aggregating tests into collections and the independence of tests from the reporting framework. The unittest frameworks supports the following concepts: Test Fixture – A fixture is what is used
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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
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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
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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
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I’ve been busily working on my second book, Python 201: Intermediate Python. In part one of the book, there are 10 chapters. I recently finished up the last chapter for that part of the book. While I have some tweaks I want to do to a couple of the chapters in this part of the
Python 201 Book Writing Update: Part 1 is Ready Read More »
Python provides a great module for creating your own iterators. The module I am referring to is itertools. The tools provided by itertools are fast and memory efficient. You will be able to take these building blocks to create your own specialized iterators that can be used for efficient looping. In this chapter, we will
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We are entering the last few days for the Kickstarter Campaign for my second book, Python 201. Since we’re almost to our stretch goal, I have added new chapters to the book. In addition to what was already covered, the book will also cover the following topics: Python’s super() descriptors (magic methods) Scope (local, global
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A ChainMap is a class from the collections module that provides the ability to link multiple mappings together such that they end up being a single unit. If you look at the documentation, you will notice that it accepts *maps, which means that a ChainMap will accept any number of mappings or dictionaries and turn
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We’re halfway through the Kickstarter campaign for my new book, Python 201 and we’re a little over halfway to my first stretch goal. If you know anyone who would like to add to their Python skills, be sure to post a link to the campaign to your social website(s) of choice. I also added a
Python 201 Kickstarter Campaign Update – New Cover Preview Read More »
The collections module has another handy tool called defaultdict. The defaultdict is a subclass of Python’s dict that accepts a default_factory as its primary argument. The default_factory is usually a Python type, such as int or list, but you can also use a function or a lambda too. Let’s start by creating a regular Python
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Over the weekend, I spent some time rearranging ideas for my latest book such that I have have four specific sections of the book. Here they are: Part I – Intermediate Modules Chapter 1 – The argparse module Chapter 2 – The collections module Chapter 3 – The contextlib module (Context Managers) Chapter 4 –
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Every so often you will find yourself needing to write code that traverse a directory. They tend to be one-off scripts or clean up scripts that run in cron in my experience. Anyway, Python provides a very useful method of walking a directory structure that is aptly called os.walk. I usually use this functionality to
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Python 3.5 added an interesting new library called typing. This adds type hinting to Python. Type hinting is kind of declaring your functions arguments to have a certain type. However the type hinting is not binding. It’s just a hint, so there’s nothing preventing the programmer from passing something they shouldn’t. This is Python after
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