Nifty Python tricks — Yasoob Khalid

Hi there folks. It’s been a long time since I last published a post. I have been busy. However in this post I am going to share some really informative tips and tricks which you might not have known about. So without wasting any time lets get straight to them:

Enumerate

Instead of doing:

i = 0
for item in iterable:
print i, item
i += 1

We can do:

for i, item in enumerate(iterable):
print i, item

Enumerate can also take a second argument. Here is an example:

>>> list(enumerate(‘abc’))

>>> list(enumerate(‘abc’, 1))

Dict/Set comprehensions

You might know about list comprehensions but you might not be aware of dict/set comprehensions. They are simple to use and just as effective. Here is an example:

my_dict = {i: i * i for i in xrange(100)}
my_set = {i * 15 for i in xrange(100)}

# There is only a difference of ‘:’ in both

Forcing float division:

If we divide whole numbers Python gives us the result as a whole number even if the result was a float. In order to circumvent this issue we have to do something like this:

result = 1.0/2

But there is another way to solve this problem which even I wasn’t aware of. You can do:

from __future__ import division
result = 1/2
# print(result)
# 0.5

Voila! Now you don’t need to append .0 in order to get an accurate answer. Do note that this trick is for Python 2 only. In Python 3 there is no need to do the import as it handles this case by default.