Posts tagged Python
Use magic methods __setitem__() and __getitem__() in Python
- 30 September 2023
In Python, there are two magic methods that can be used to implement the behavior of the subscript operator []. These methods are object.__setitem__() and object.__getitem__(). The first one is used to assign a value to an item, the second one is used to retrieve an item.
The following example shows how to use these methods to implement a memory class as a list of bytes that was used in the 6502 emulator. The memory class has two methods get() and set() that are used to retrieve and assign a value to a memory address.
Chaining methods in Python
- 14 September 2023
Method chaining is a programming style in which multiple method calls are made on the same object, in sequence. Each method call returns the object itself, so the next method can be called on it without having to assign the object to a variable in between.
This can make code more concise and readable, as it can be written as a single line of code instead of multiple lines. It can also make code more efficient, as the object does not have to be passed around between methods.
Check Python with Flake8 Bugbear
- 29 July 2023
Flake8 is a Python tool that checks Python code for style, programming errors, and help reduce code complexity. It is a wrapper around PyFlakes, pycodestyle, and Ned Batchelder’s McCabe script. Flake8 has a plugin structure and there are many plugins available. One of the plugins is Flake8 Bugbear. Flake8 Bugbear is a plugin for Flake8 that finds likely bugs and design problems in your program. It is a plugin for Flake8 that adds rules from the community that are not included in the core flake8 package.
As Flake8 Bugbear is a plugin for Flake8, you need to install Flake8 first. You can install Flake8 Bugbear with pip for example and in the example below Flake8 Bugbear is installed into a virtual environment.
Use removeprefix instead of lstrip to remove a prefix from a string
- 19 July 2023
Python 3.9 introduced new methods called bytearray.removeprefix() and bytearray.removesuffix() via PEP 616 to remove a prefix or suffix from a string. These methods are similar to str.lstrip() and str.rstrip() but they are more efficient and easier to use as they use a string instead of a set of characters. The latter is useful when you want to remove a prefix or suffix from a string that is not a set of characters.
Lets see an example where we want to remove the prefix www. from a list of URLs as shown below:
Installing Ansible with Python
- 14 July 2023
In posts Installing Ansible on Ubuntu 22.04 and Installing Ansible on Debian 12 Ansible was installed via the package manager. Another option is to install Ansible with Python in a virtual environment so you can have multiple Ansible versions installed on the same machine.
Since Ansible is written in Python, it can be installed in a Python virtual environment which is a self-contained directory tree that contains a Python installation for a particular version of Python, plus a number of additional packages. The virtual environment can be created with the venv module, which is part of the Python since version 3.4.
Finding the longest or shortest item in a list
- 26 May 2022
Python is a powerful language to quickly and efficiently do work with data, but it requires a more in-depth knowledge of the language to write more elegant and readable code. For many new Python programmers, this is a catch-22 as they’re still learning all the details and it takes time. Let’s take a simple example about finding the longest string in a list and simplify some code. Secondly making the code faster as we will use built-in functions at machine speed instead of interpreting Python code.
The example is a for-loop over a list and checks if the new item is longer than the current longest item before it stores it as the longest. Afterward, it prints the result which will be longest in this case.