Introduction Dictionaries are one of the most used data structures in all of software development, and for a good reason. They allow us to store our data in neat key, value pairs, which in turn gives us the ability to, on average, access our data in O(1) time. While using a dictionary it’s important to know how to iterate over it. Not being able to recover the data you stored makes it practically useless. In this article, we’ll see how […]

Introduction In this article we’re going to be taking a look at the try/except clause, and specifically how you can catch multiple exceptions in a single line, as well as how to use the suppress() method. Both of these techniques will help you in writing more accessible and versatile code that adheres to DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principles. Let’s start by looking at the problem: try: do_the_thing() except TypeError as e: do_the_other_thing() except KeyError as e: do_the_other_thing() except IndexError as […]

Introduction Selecting a random element or value from a list is a common task – be it for randomized result from a list of recommendations or just a random prompt. In this article, we’ll take a look at how to randomly select elements from a list in Python. We’ll cover the retrieval of both singular random elements, as well as retrieving multiple elements – with and without repetition. Selecting a Random Element From Python List The most intuitive and natural […]