Introduction Modules are the highest level organizational unit in Python. If you’re at least a little familiar with Python, you’ve probably not only used ready modules, but also created a few yourself. So what exactly is a module? Modules are units that store code and data, provide code-reuse to Python projects, and are also useful in partitioning the system’s namespaces in self-contained packages. They’re self-contained because you can only access a module’s attributes after importing it. You can also understand […]

Choosing the Right Loop Construct Python offers a variety of constructs to do loops. This article presents them and gives advice on their specific usage. Furthermore, we will also have a look at the performance of each looping construct in your Python code. It might be surprising for you. Loops, Loops, Loops A programming language typically consists of several types of basic elements, such as assignments, statements, and loops. The idea behind a loop is to repeat single actions that […]

The yield keyword in Python is used to create generators. A generator is a type of collection that produces items on-the-fly and can only be iterated once. By using generators you can improve your application’s performance and consume less memory as compared to normal collections, so it provides a nice boost in performance. In this article we’ll explain how to use the yield keyword in Python and what it does exactly. But first, let’s study the difference between a simple […]

Introduction Sooner or later string formatting becomes a necessary evil for most programmers. More so in the past before the thick client GUI era, but the need to have a specific string representation is still a common enough use case. My first introduction was back in college when I had an old-school prof that had a impure love for making us write Java console applications with neurotic specifications for outputting with the printf(…) function. One thing that held true then […]

What is Python zlib The Python zlib library provides a Python interface to the zlib C library, which is a higher-level abstraction for the DEFLATE lossless compression algorithm. The data format used by the library is specified in the RFC 1950 to 1952, which is available at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1950.txt. The zlib compression format is free to use, and is not covered by any patent, so you can safely use it in commercial products as well. It is a lossless compression format […]

What is Crontab Cron is a software utility that allows us to schedule tasks on Unix-like systems. The name is derived from the Greek word “Chronos”, which means “time”. The tasks in Cron are defined in a crontab, which is a text file containing the commands to be executed. The syntax used in a crontab is described below in this article. Python presents us with the crontab module to manage scheduled jobs via Cron. The functions available in it allow […]