Every now and then you’ll find yourself needing to load modules or classes dynamically. In other words, you’ll want to be able to import a module without knowing ahead of time which one you’re going to import. In this article, we’ll look at two ways to accomplish this feat in Python. Using the __import__ Magic […]
Advanced Python – How to Dynamically Load Modules or Classes Read More »
List comprehensions in Python are very handy. They can also be a little hard to understand when and why you would use them. List comprehensions tend to be harder to read than just using a simple for loop as well. We’ll spend some time looking at how to construct list comprehensions and learn how they
Python 201: List Comprehensions Read More »
Today we’re going to take a look at Tkinter! I was curious about how one would go about hiding a frame and then re-showing it using Tkinter and I kept finding threads (like this one) that talked about using withdraw() and deiconify() but didn’t really provide any usable code. In wxPython, I did this sort
Tkinter: How to Show / Hide a Window Read More »
Mercurial is a free, distributed source control versioning tool, similar to git or bazaar. Some might even compare it CVS or Subversion (SVN), although those are not distributed versioning systems. The Python programming core development team chose to switch to Mercurial from SVN a couple years ago and many other high profile 3rd party Python
An Intro to Mercurial Read More »
While researching PDF libraries for Python, I stumbled across another little project called metaPDF. According to its website, metaPDF is a lightweight Python library optimized for metadata extraction and insertion, and it is a fast wrapper over the excellent pyPdf library. It works by quickly searching the last 2048 bytes of the PDF before parsing
Python PDF Series – An Intro to metaPDF Read More »
Some teens from around the world decided to learn Python using Raspberry Pi to write a game during a sprint starting today and running through tomorrow. They are taking donations to give to the Raspberry Pi foundation too. You can follow their live stream if you want to. Raspberry Pi is an ARM GNU/Linux box
Raspithon starts today! Read More »
There are lots of different ways to download a file from the internet using Python. One popular way is to connect to an FTP server and download your files that way. So that is what we will be looking at in this article. All you need is your standard installation of Python. It includes a
Python 101: Downloading a File with ftplib Read More »
Virtual environments can be really handy for testing software. That’s true in programming circles too. Ian Bicking created the virtualenv project, which is a tool for creating isolated Python environments. You can use these environments to test out new versions of your software, new versions of packages you depend on or just as a sandbox
Getting Started with virtualenv Read More »
Pip Installs Python or pip is a tool for installing and managing Python packages, many of which are on the Python Package Index (PyPI). It is a replacement of easy_install. In this article, we’ll spend a little time trying out pip to see how it works and how it might help us in our Python
Python 101: pip – a replacement for easy_install Read More »
Today we’re going to take a look at the controversial easy_install method of installing Python modules and packages. We will also learn how to create our own *.egg files. You will need to go get the SetupTools package to follow along. This package doesn’t support Python 3.x so if you need that, see pip or
Python 101: easy_install or how to create eggs Read More »
Last time we learned how to create modules and packages. Today we’re going to take the package we created and use Python’s distutils to create a couple different ways to distribute our code. In this tutorial, we’ll be learning the following: How to create a setup.py file How to create a source distribution How to
Python 201: An Intro to distutils Read More »
Creating Python modules is something that most Python programmers do every day. Any time you save a new Python script, you have created a new module. You can import your module into other modules. A package is a collection of modules. The things you import into your scripts from the standard library are modules or
Python 201: Creating Modules and Packages Read More »
The other day I saw a question on StackOverflow about how to dynamically destroy and create panels after a certain amount of time has passed. I told the fellow that he could use the examples from one of my blog articles where I destroyed and created buttons, but the dude just didn’t get it. So
wxPython: Making a panel self-destruct Read More »
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 »