The other day I was asked if there was a way to sort a dictionary by value. If you use Python regularly, then you know that the dictionary data structure is by definition an unsorted mapping type. Some would define a dict as a hash table. Regardless, I needed a way to sort a nested […]
Python 201: How to sort a dictionary by value Read More »
There are several cool ways to create PDFs with Python. In this article we will be focusing on a cool little tool called rst2pdf, which takes a text file that contains Restructured Text and converts it to a PDF. The rst2pdf package requires Reportlab to function. This won’t be a tutorial on Restructured Text, although
An Intro to rst2pdf – Changing Restructured Text into PDFs with Python Read More »
I didn’t think I’d do one of these link roundups this week, but I decided to go for it anyway. In fact, I found a cool little tool for obtaining information about installed Python packages and querying packages available on PyPI (Python Package Index) called yolk too! Anyway, here’s this week’s reading list. I hope
Weekly Python Links Roundup (6/15/2012) Read More »
There are several code analysis tools for Python. The most well known is pylint. Then there’s pychecker and now we’re moving on to pyflakes. The pyflakes project is a part of something known as the Divmod Project. Pyflakes doesn’t actually execute the code it checks, unlike pychecker. Of course, pylint also doesn’t execute the code.
pyflakes – the passive checker of Python programs Read More »
Python code analysis can be a heavy subject, but it can be very helpful in making your programs better. There are several Python code analyzers that you can use to check your code and see if they conform to standards. pylint is probably the most popular. It’s very configurable, customizable and pluggable too. It also
PyLint: Analyzing Python Code Read More »
Today we’ll spend some time looking at three different ways to make Python submit a web form. In this case, we will be doing a web search with duckduckgo.com searching on the term “python” and saving the result as an HTML file. We will use Python’s included urllib modules and two 3rd party packages: requests
Python 101: How to submit a web form Read More »
Downloading files from the internet is something that almost every programmer will have to do at some point. Python provides several ways to do just that in its standard library. Probably the most popular way to download a file is over HTTP using the urllib or urllib2 module. Python also comes with ftplib for FTP
Python 101: How to Download a File Read More »
A couple years ago I started a series of articles on XML parsing. I covered lxml’s etree and Python’s included minidom XML parsing library. For whatever reason I didn’t notice lxml’s objectify sub-package, but I saw it recently and decided I should check it out. To my mind, the objectify module seems to be even
Parsing XML with Python using lxml.objectify Read More »
It may have been a better idea to have called this this article “How to Convert Floats to Words”, but since I’m talking about currency, I thought using Decimal was more accurate. Anyway, a couple years ago, I wrote about how to convert numbers to Python. The main reason I’m revisiting this topic is because
How to Convert Decimal Numbers to Words with Python Read More »
It’s the first Friday of June and I’ve read a bunch of new articles this week. From the Vern’s rant about getting Python jobs to a review of the web2py cookbook, there’s lots of fun things going on in Python land. Here are just a few other articles I thought were interesting: Batchelder talks about
Weekly Python Links Roundup (6/1/2012) Read More »
Last week, I was reading Brett Cannon’s blog where he talks about function signatures and decorating the main function. I didn’t follow everything he talked about, but I thought the concept was really interesting. The following code is an example based on a recipe that Mr. Cannon mentioned. I think it illustrates what he’s talking
Python 201: Decorating the main function Read More »
I haven’t done a weekly round-up of Python links because no one seemed to really care when I was doing those. However I thought I’d give it one more try and see if there was any interest this time around. This past week, I finished reading my first web2py cookbook. I’m told there’s another book
Weekly Python Links Roundup Resurrected! Read More »
I’m a little excited today as my first patch (and first ticket even!) has been accepted. And it really didn’t take very long either. Less than 24 hours after I had submitted my first patch, I got my contribution added. I did have to submit to more variations of the patch though as my first
My First Patch Was Accepted! Read More »
I was reading Hynek Schlawack’s excellent article on becoming a Python core developer and decided to find out just how hard it would be to get set up on my machine so that I could be ready to do core development myself, should I ever get the honor of being a part of the team.
Python on Windows: How to Get Set Up to Help with Core Development Read More »
I was reading the Python blog feed yesterday and stumbled on Tarek Ziade’s Python Meme article. I thought it sounded like a fun idea, so here’s my answers to his questions.
New Year’s Python Meme – #2012pythonmeme Read More »