Python is often marketed as a batteries-included language because it comes with almost everything you’d ever expect from a programming language. This statement is mostly true, as the standard library and the external modules cover a broad spectrum of programming needs. However, Python lacks built-in support for the YAML data format, commonly used for configuration and serialization, despite clear similarities between the two languages. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to work with YAML in Python using the available third-party […]

Python has a lot of GUI frameworks, but Tkinter is the only framework that’s built into the Python standard library. Tkinter has several strengths. It’s cross-platform, so the same code works on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Visual elements are rendered using native operating system elements, so applications built with Tkinter look like they belong on the platform where they’re run. Although Tkinter is considered the de facto Python GUI framework, it’s not without criticism. One notable criticism is that GUIs […]

Django has a Paginator class that comes built in and ready to use. Perhaps you have a project on the go, and you’d like to try out the pagination implementations in the following sections with your app as your base. No problem! However, if you want to follow the step-by-step code examples in this tutorial, then you can download the source code for the Django Python wiki project from the Real Python materials repository: This wiki project contains an app […]

When you’re automating some task, for example packaging your application for Docker, you’ll often find yourself writing shell scripts. You might have a bash script to drive the packaging process, and another script as an entry point for the container. As your packaging grows in complexity, so does your shell script. Everything works fine. And then, one day, your shell script does something completely wrong. That’s when you realize your mistake: bash, and shell scripting languages in general, are mostly […]

When you look at an image, you see the objects and people in it. However, when you read an image programmatically with Python or any other language, the computer sees an array of numbers. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to manipulate images and perform basic image processing using the Python Pillow library. Pillow and its predecessor, PIL, are the original Python libraries for dealing with images. Even though there are other Python libraries for image processing, Pillow remains an […]

Look back at how you added the Python timer to the example above. Note that you need at least one variable (tic) to store the state of the Python timer before you download the tutorial. After studying the code a little, you might also note that the three highlighted lines are added only for timing purposes! Now, you’ll create a class that does the same as your manual calls to perf_counter(), but in a more readable and consistent manner. Throughout […]

Invented over half a century ago, the hash table is a classic data structure that has been fundamental to programming. To this day, it helps solve many real-life problems, such as indexing database tables, caching computed values, or implementing sets. It often comes up in job interviews, and Python uses hash tables all over the place to make name lookups almost instantaneous. Even though Python comes with its own hash table called dict, it can be helpful to understand how […]