I wrote an article on this topic several years ago, but I think it is time for me to revisit it. Why? Well, lately I’ve been doing a lot of work on a program for sending emails and I’ve been looking at my old article and thinking I missed a few things when I first […]
Python 102: How to Send an Email Using smtplib + email Read More »
If you have followed this blog for a while, you may remember that we’ve covered several XML parsing libraries that are included with Python. In this article, we’ll be continuing that series by taking a quick look at the ElementTree library. You will learn how to create an XML file, edit XML and parse the
Python 101 – Intro to XML Parsing with ElementTree Read More »
Python provides robust exception handing baked right into the language. Exception handing is something every programmer will need to learn. It allows the programmer to continue their program or gracefully terminate the application after an exception has occurred. Python uses a try/except/finally convention. We’ll spend some time learning about standard exceptions, how to create a
Python 101: Exception Handling Read More »
There are a lot of computer languages that include the ternary (or tertiary) operator, which is basically a one-line conditional expression in Python. If you’re interested, you can read about the various ways it’s rendered in other languages over on Wikipedia. Here we will spend some time looking at several different examples and why you
Python 101: The Ternary Operator Read More »
Python provides a very powerful logging library in its standard library. A lot of programmers use print statements for debugging (myself included), but you can also use logging to do this. It’s actually cleaner to use logging as you won’t have to go through all your code to remove the print statements. In this tutorial
Python 101: An Intro to logging 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 »
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 »
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 »
Last time we learned how to create modules and packages. Today we’re going to take the package we created and use Python’s distutils to create a couple different ways to distribute our code. In this tutorial, we’ll be learning the following: How to create a setup.py file How to create a source distribution How to
Python 201: An Intro to distutils Read More »
Creating Python modules is something that most Python programmers do every day. Any time you save a new Python script, you have created a new module. You can import your module into other modules. A package is a collection of modules. The things you import into your scripts from the standard library are modules or
Python 201: Creating Modules and Packages Read More »
Whether you’re new to Python, been using it for a few years or you’re an expert, knowing how to use Python’s introspection capabilities can help your understanding of your code and that new package you just downloaded with the crappy documentation. Introspection is a fancy word that means to observe oneself and ponder one’s thoughts,
Python 101: Introspection Read More »
When I began learning Python, one of the first things I needed to know how to do was open a file. Now, the term “open a file” can mean different things depending on the context. Sometimes it means to actually open the file with Python and read from it, like with a text file. Other
Python 101: How to Open a File or Program Read More »