Software engineering and personal development
One way to improve the concision of your Python code is by using the ternary operator, a handy tool that allows you to condense an if-else statement into a single line of code.
Let us jump straight into it.
Imagine that you have the following comparison:
x = 5
y = 10
if x > y:
result = x
else:
result = yYou can then write it in a single line:
result = x if x > y else y
The Python Counter class from the collections module is a powerful tool that we can also use for counting the occurrences of elements in a list.
The majority of the world puts days in front of months in their dates:
However, there can be cases when you get as input a date where the month is in front of the day.
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A leap year is a year that has 366 days instead of the usual 365. It occurs every four years and is the year when an extra day, February 29th, is added to the calendar. This day, known as a leap day, helps to keep the calendar aligned with the Earth’s movements around the sun. Leap years occur every four years, with the next one occurring in 2024.
We can check whether a year is a leap year in Python in a few ways.
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If you need to get the number of days in a month in Python, you can do that quite quickly.
We are going to do that using the calendar module.
First, import the calendar module and then call the method monthrange() which returns the first_day and also the number_of_days in a month.
Let us see this in action:
import calendarContinue reading
# Get current month
_, number_of_days = calendar.monthrange(2023, 2)
print(number_of_days) # 28
In some companies, they pay their employees on the first day of every month.
If you want to know what day of the week will that be, you can find that quickly in Python using the calendar module.
Let us assume that you want to check the first day of the next month:
import calendarContinue reading
first_day, _ = calendar.monthrange(2022, 12)
If you want to delete every other element in a list in Python, you can do that fairly quickly.
Let us assume that we want to delete elements that are in positions 0, 2, 4, 6, meaning that we are starting from index 0 and we are adding 2 for every next element that we are deleting.
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There can be cases where you do not want to remove just one element from a list, but many elements in one step.
In this case, the remove() method does not help us since it simply removes the first instance that it finds.
Let us take a list as an example:
my_list = ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g"]Continue reading
One of the things that you can do with lists is deleted elements that are already there.
Lists are mutable so you can add, edit, or delete elements from them.
Let us see how we can delete one element from a list.
Let us say that we have the following list:
my_list = ["a", "b", "c", "d"]Continue reading
Anagrams are strings that have the same letters but in a different order for example abc, bca, cab, acb, bac are all anagrams, since they all contain the same letters.
We can check whether two strings are anagrams in Python in different ways. One way to do that would be to use Counter from the collections module.
From the documentation:
A Counter is a dict subclass for counting hashable objects. It is a collection where elements are stored as dictionary keys and their counts are stored as dictionary values. Counts are allowed to be any integer value including zero or negative counts. The Counter class is similar to bags or multisets in other languages.
In plain English, with Counter, we can get a dictionary that represents the frequency of elements in a list. Let us see this in an example:
from collections import Counter
print(Counter("Hello")) # Counter({'l': 2, 'H': 1, 'e': 1, 'o': 1})
Now we can use Counter to quickly check whether two strings are anagrams or not:
from collections import Counter
def check_if_anagram(first_string, second_string):
first_string = first_string.lower()
second_string = second_string.lower()
return Counter(first_string) == Counter(second_string)
print(check_if_anagram('testinG', 'Testing')) # True
print(check_if_anagram('Here', 'Rehe')) # True
print(check_if_anagram('Know', 'Now')) # False
We can also check whether 2 strings are anagrams using sorted():
def check_if_anagram(first_word, second_word):
first_word = first_word.lower()
second_word = second_word.lower()
return sorted(first_word) == sorted(second_word)
print(check_if_anagram("testinG", "Testing")) # True
print(check_if_anagram("Here", "Rehe")) # True
print(check_if_anagram("Know", "Now")) # False
That’s basically it.
I hope you find this useful.
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