One of my friends on the wxPython Google Group asked how to catch any exception that happens in wxPython. The problem is complicated somewhat because wxPython is a wrapper on top of a C++ library (wxWidgets). You can read about the issue on the wxPython wiki. Several wxPython users mentioned using Python’s sys.excepthook to catch […]
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Sometimes when you are coding, you want to know how long it takes for a particular function to run. This topic is known as profiling or performance tuning. Python has a couple of profilers built into its Standard Library, but for small pieces of code, it’s easier to just use Python’s timeit module. Thus, timeit
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I’ve been thinking about creating a simple downloading script with wxPython for quite a while. Then I saw someone on StackOverflow asking about how to do it and I decided it was time to figure it out. Downloading a file with Python is trivial. I wrote about a couple of different ways to do that
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A few years ago, a fellow named Zed Shaw created a website called Learn Python the Hard Way that a lot of people praised. The website is made up of lots of short exercises that help beginner programmers learn the various nuances of Python but in bit-sized chunks. He kept updating it from time to
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The topic of generators has been covered numerous times before. However, it’s still a topic that a lot of new programmers have trouble with and I would hazard a guess that even experienced users don’t really use them either. Python generators allow developers to lazily evaluate data. This is very helpful when you are dealing
Python 201: An Intro to Generators Read More »
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Yasoob Khalid who authors the Free Python Tips blog So hi there guys! I hope you are fine. So what is in this post? Today we will be writing a cleanup script. The idea for this post came from Mike Driscoll who recently wrote a very useful
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The wxPython toolkit provides an alternative to using Sizers for layout that is known as “sized_controls”. These controls or widgets are basically top-level widgets (like frame, panel, dialog, etc) that have sizing logic built into them. This article will cover all four types of sized_controls. They are as follows: SizedPanel SizedScrolledPanel SizedFrame SizedDialog The SizedScrolledPanel
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wxPython 2.9 introduced the world to a new type of sizer that can take widgets and automatically make them “wrap” around as you resize the frame. That sizer is known as wx.WrapSizer. For some reason, it is relatively unknown, so we’ll spend a few minutes going over how to use it in this article. To
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The Python programming language added the super() type back in version 2.2. For some reason, it’s still a topic that a lot of beginners don’t understand. One of my readers recently asked me about it and since I don’t really use it, I decided to do some research in the hopes of understanding its usage
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Python has a neat little concept called a property that can do several useful things. In this article, we will be looking into how to do the following: Convert class methods into read-only attributes Reimplement setters and getters into an attribute In this article, you will learn how to use the builtin class property in
Python 201: Properties Read More »
I’ve been reading a lot about Python’s magic methods lately and recently read about a couple of ways to create an immutable class. An immutable class does not allow the programmer to add attributes to an instance (i.e. monkey patch). It’s a little easier to understand if we actually look at a normal class first.
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The Real Python: Advanced Web Development, featuring Django 1.6 KickStarter campaign released a preview chapter today called “Software Craftmanship”. It is the first chapter from the book. The PDF download consists of 33 pages. You can go get it too by going to the following address: http://www.realpython.com/preview/. If you haven’t already, you can still support
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Python’s first mainstream package was the .egg file. Now there’s a new format in town called the Wheel (*.whl). A wheel “is designed to contain all the files for a PEP 376 compatible install in a way that is very close to the on-disk format”. In this article, we will learn how to create a
Python: Packaging with Wheel Read More »
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) has been with us for a long time and allows us to see new articles on our favorite website easily. Python doesn’t have an RSS reader module in the standard library, so we’ll be using the Universal Feed Parser 5.1.3 to do our parsing. If you do not have it already,
wxPython: Creating a Simple RSS Reader Read More »
The other day I had an interesting task I needed to complete with Reportlab. I needed to create a PDF in landscape orientation that had to be rotated 90 degrees when I saved it. To make it easier to lay out the document, I created a class with a flag that allows me to save
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