Reportlab is really nice tool for creating PDFs in Python. A little known fact is that they now support adding charts or graphs to your PDF. Previously if you wanted that functionality, you would have to do all the drawing code yourself. Unfortunately, the Reportlab guide doesn’t really explain how to use their charts, what […]
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There is a little known tool that I wanted to talk about today. It is called wraps and it’s a part of the functools module. You can use wraps as a decorator to fix docstrings and names of decorated functions. Why does this matter? This sounds like a weird edge case at first, but if
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This week we welcome Mike Bayer (@zzzeek) as our PyDev of the Week. Mike is the creator of the popular SQLAlchemy project. He has a fun Python blog and contributes to many Python projects. I’ve seen Mike present tutorials on SQLAlchemy at PyCon and he regularly does talks there as well (here’s an example from
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Python comes with a fun module called functools. One of its classes is the partial class. You can use it create a new function with partial application of the arguments and keywords that you pass to it. You can use partial to “freeze” a portion of your function’s arguments and/or keywords which results in a
The Python 101 Screencast has been finished for a little over a month now and I am now releasing it for general consumption. The Python 101 Screencast is based on my book, Python 101. I went through all 44 chapters of the book and turned each of them into a standalone screencast. In other words,
Python 101 Screencast Released Read More »
This week we welcome Chris Withers as our PyDev of the Week! Chris has been using Python for quite a while. I think the first packages I used of his were the excellent xlrd and xlwt packages, used for reading and writing Excel files. You can get an idea of his contributions to Python on
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Earlier this week, I came across another fun package called datefinder. The idea behind this package is that it can take any string with dates in it and transform them into a list of Python datetime objects. I would have loved this package at my old job where I did a lot of text file
Python – The datefinder package Read More »
Webucator recently contacted me to let me know that they have finished up an Introduction to Python Training that they are allowing people to take for free for the month of February. The course is made up of videos, exercises, readings, and quizzes. You can get it free by using the following code when you
Free Intro to Python Course from Webucator Read More »
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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This week we welcome Oliver Schoenborn as our PyDev of the Week. He is the author of the PyPubSub project, a version of which is included with wxPython. He has been an active contributor on the wxPython mailing list where I have always appreciated his insights. You might find his Dr. Dobbs article interesting as
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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
Python 101: How to traverse a directory Read More »
This week we’re doing something a little different. Instead of just one developer, I am interviewing the main developers behind xlwings: Felix Zumstein & Eric Reynolds. Let’s spend some time getting to know our fellow Pythonistas! Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc): Felix: I am the founder of Zoomer Analytics,
PyDevs of the Week: Felix Zumstein & Eric Reynolds Read More »
The other day, I came across an interesting project called sh, which I believe refers to the shell (or terminal). It used to be the pbs project, but they renamed it for reasons I haven’t figured out. Regardless, the sh package is a wrapper around subprocess that allows the developer to call executables a little
A Brief Intro to the sh Package Read More »
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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This week we welcome Ian Cordasco as our PyDev of the Week. He is a very active contributor to many Python-related projects, such as Requests, Flake8, PyFlakes and much more. Let’s spend some time getting to know our fellow Pythonista! Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc): My educational background is
PyDev of the Week: Ian Cordasco Read More »