Descriptors were introduced to Python way back in version 2.2. They provide the developer with the ability to add managed attributes to objects. The methods needed to create a descriptor are __get__, __set__ and __delete__. If you define any of these methods, then you have created a descriptor. The idea behind the descriptor is to […]
Python 201: What are descriptors? Read More »
The other day, I decided I wanted to create a decorator to catch exceptions and log them. I found a rather complex example on Github that I used for some ideas on how to approach this task and came up with the following: # exception_decor.py import functools import logging def create_logger(): “”” Creates a logging
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Regular expressions are basically a tiny language all their own that you can use inside of Python and many other programming languages. You will often hear regular expressions referred to as “regex”, “regexp” or just “RE”. Some languages, such as Perl and Ruby, actually support regular expression syntax directly in the language itself. Python only
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This week we welcome Kenneth Reitz (@kennethreitz) as our PyDev of the Week! Kenneth is the developer behind the Requests package, which is one of my favorites. He is also the co-author of the upcoming O’Reilly Book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python. You can visit his website to see what he’s been up to or
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This week we welcome R. David Murray (@rdavidmurray) as our PyDev of the Week. Mr. Murray is a core developer of the Python language and is currently maintainer of the email module. He has a Python blog, although it hasn’t been updated in a while. You might want to check out his Github profile to
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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
Python 201 – super Read More »
What does it mean to benchmark ones code? The main idea behind benchmarking or profiling is to figure out how fast your code executes and where the bottlenecks are. The main reason to do this sort of thing is for optimization. You will run into situations where you need your code to run faster because
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This week we welcome Wesley Chun as our PyDev of the Week! Wesley Chun, MSCS, is author of Prentice Hall’s bestselling “Core Python” series (corepython.com), the “Python Fundamentals” companion videos, co-author of “Python Web Development with Django” (withdjango.com), and has written for Linux Journal, CNET, and InformIT. In addition to being an engineer at Google,
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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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The other day I ran into a use case where I needed to communicate with a subprocess I had started but I needed it to timeout. Unfortunately, Python 2 does not have a way to timeout the communicate method call so it just blocks until it either returns or the process itself closes. There are
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This week we welcome Ed Leafe (@EdLeafe) as our PyDev of the Week! Ed is one of the co-creators of the Dabo Application Framework, which is a neat wrapper around wxPython and is aimed at building database driven applications, although you can use it for more than that. Ed also authors a fun tech blog.
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This week we welcome Karsten Hilbert as our PyDev of the Week! Karsten took over the GNUmed project, which is a an open source electronic medical record program written mostly in Python. Let’s take a few moments to get to know him better! Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc): I
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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 »
You have probably been using iterators and generators since you started programming in Python but you may not have realized it. In this article, we will learn what an iterator and a generator are. We will also be learning how they are created so we can create our own should we need to. Iterators An
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