Hidden features of Python [closed]

Question

Chaining comparison operators:

>>> x = 5
>>> 1 < x < 10
True
>>> 10 < x < 20 
False
>>> x < 10 < x*10 < 100
True
>>> 10 > x <= 9
True
>>> 5 == x > 4
True

In case you're thinking it's doing 1 < x, which comes out as True, and then comparing True < 10, which is also True, then no, that's really not what happens (see the last example.) It's really translating into 1 < x and x < 10, and x < 10 and 10 < x * 10 and x*10 < 100, but with less typing and each term is only evaluated once.

Get the python regex parse tree to debug your regex.

Regular expressions are a great feature of python, but debugging them can be a pain, and it's all too easy to get a regex wrong.

Fortunately, python can print the regex parse tree, by passing the undocumented, experimental, hidden flag re.DEBUG (actually, 128) to re.compile.

>>> re.compile("^\[font(?:=(?P<size>[-+][0-9]{1,2}))?\](.*?)[/font]",
    re.DEBUG)
at at_beginning
literal 91
literal 102
literal 111
literal 110
literal 116
max_repeat 0 1
  subpattern None
    literal 61
    subpattern 1
      in
        literal 45
        literal 43
      max_repeat 1 2
        in
          range (48, 57)
literal 93
subpattern 2
  min_repeat 0 65535
    any None
in
  literal 47
  literal 102
  literal 111
  literal 110
  literal 116

Once you understand the syntax, you can spot your errors. There we can see that I forgot to escape the [] in [/font].

Of course you can combine it with whatever flags you want, like commented regexes:

>>> re.compile("""
 ^              # start of a line
 \[font         # the font tag
 (?:=(?P<size>  # optional [font=+size]
 [-+][0-9]{1,2} # size specification
 ))?
 \]             # end of tag
 (.*?)          # text between the tags
 \[/font\]      # end of the tag
 """, re.DEBUG|re.VERBOSE|re.DOTALL)

enumerate

Wrap an iterable with enumerate and it will yield the item along with its index.

For example:

>>> a = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e']
>>> for index, item in enumerate(a): print index, item
...
0 a
1 b
2 c
3 d
4 e
>>>

References:

• Python tutorial—looping techniques
• Python docs—built-in functions—enumerate
• PEP 279

Creating generators objects

If you write

x=(n for n in foo if bar(n))

you can get out the generator and assign it to x. Now it means you can do

for n in x:

The advantage of this is that you don't need intermediate storage, which you would need if you did

x = [n for n in foo if bar(n)]

In some cases this can lead to significant speed up.

You can append many if statements to the end of the generator, basically replicating nested for loops:

>>> n = ((a,b) for a in range(0,2) for b in range(4,6))
>>> for i in n:
...   print i 

(0, 4)
(0, 5)
(1, 4)
(1, 5)

iter() can take a callable argument

For instance:

def seek_next_line(f):
    for c in iter(lambda: f.read(1),'\n'):
        pass

The iter(callable, until_value) function repeatedly calls callable and yields its result until until_value is returned.

Be careful with mutable default arguments

>>> def foo(x=[]):
...     x.append(1)
...     print x
... 
>>> foo()
[1]
>>> foo()
[1, 1]
>>> foo()
[1, 1, 1]

Instead, you should use a sentinel value denoting "not given" and replace with the mutable you'd like as default:

>>> def foo(x=None):
...     if x is None:
...         x = []
...     x.append(1)
...     print x
>>> foo()
[1]
>>> foo()
[1]