Introduction to Batch APIs In modern Python applications, it’s common to access remote API using REST or other web-based technologies. Batch APIs are capable of processing multiple requests with a single call. You can use batch APIs to reduce the number of network calls to the remote service. This is ideal when you have to […]
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Python 3.6 added another way to do string interpolation that is called “f-strings” or Formatted string literals (PEP 498). The idea behind f-strings is to make string interpolation simpler. To create an f-string, you just need to prefix the string with the letter “f”. The string itself can be formatted in much the same way
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Python has some powerful features that allow you to introspect your code or the code of others. I created the following video tutorial to help you learn how that works. This tutorial is from the Python 101 Screencast Related Articles Python 101: Introspection
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Python 3.5 added more support for Unpacking Generalizations in PEP 448. According to the PEP, it added extended usages of the * iterable unpacking operator and ** dictionary unpacking operators to allow unpacking in more positions, an arbitrary number of times, and in additional circumstances. What this means is that we can now make calls
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Python 3.6 added a new module called secrets that is designed “to provide an obvious way to reliably generate cryptographically strong pseudo-random values suitable for managing secrets, such as account authentication, tokens, and similar”. Python’s random module was never designed for cryptographic use but for modeling and simulation. Of course, you could always use the
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Python 3.6 added the ability to create Asynchronous Comprehensions and Asynchronous Generators. You can read about asynchronous comprehension in PEP 530 while the asynchronous generators are described in PEP 525. The documentation states that you can now create asynchronous list, set and dict comprehensions and generator expressions. Their example looks like this: result = [i
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Python 3.6 added yet another way to do string substitution that they are calling “Formatted String Literals”. You can read all about the concept in PEP 498. I take a bit of umbrage here in that the Zen of Python states that There should be one– and preferable only one –obvious way to do it.
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Python 3.6 added another interesting new feature that is known as Syntax for variable annotations. This new feature is outlined in PEP 526. The basic premise of this PEP is take the idea of Type Hinting (PEP 484) to its next logical step, which is basically adding option type definitions to Python variables, including class
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Python 3.6 added some interesting new features. The one that we will be looking at in this article comes from PEP 515: Underscores in Numeric Literals. As the name of the PEP implies, this basically gives you the ability to write long numbers with underscores where the comma normally would be. In other words, 1000000
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I am happy to announce my first Udemy course on the Python programming language. It is called Python by Example and is a re-branding of my Python 101 Screencast series. I had originally hoped to keep the name, Python 101 on Udemy, but someone else had already taken it by the time I got my
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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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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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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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Python fairly recently added partial support for function overloading in Python 3.4. They did this by adding a neat little decorator to the functools module called singledispatch. This decorator will transform your regular function into a single dispatch generic function. Note however that singledispatch only happens based on the first argument’s type. Let’s take a
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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
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