Software engineering and personal development
Lists are used pretty much all over the place in Python and in other programming languages as well.
Checking whether they have elements or not represents something that you may need to do.
One interesting thing about Python is that it allows you to do the same thing in more than just one way, as we can see in this case.
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There can be many cases when you want to get elements from a list of named variables and not have to always use indexes.
For example, let us assume that we have a list that has five elements:
my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4]Continue reading
You have probably seen cases when you can do splits of strings into multiple parts based on a pattern that is observed in the string. For example, let us say that we want to save all the words that are part of a sentence.
To do that, we usually try to do split the sentence into words based on the spaces that we find, such as:
If you are working with many numbers in Python, you probably need to do some rounding to cut off some digits that you may not need at all.
For example, let us say that you are calculating an average salary in a company and the average number that you have found is around 54,334.218
This may not be a number that can look good in a final report you want to submit to someone. You should instead round it.
Let us do it in Python:
As you can see, the number 2 after the comma represents the number of digits we want to keep. The thing is, we can also use negative numbers to specify the number of digits we want to keep.
If we use -1, we are doing the rounding to the nearest ten:
When we need to do the rounding to the nearest hundert, we use -2:
If we want to do the rounding to the nearest thousand, we use -3:
This may seem something quite trivial, but I also got to learn it just recently.
I hope you find this useful.
If you are implementing a new class, but do not have time now, or simply want to postpone it for later, then you can use the pass statement.
I have seen it being used all over the place, and I think it is a good idea to use it when you are writing a class that does not have any bodies of any methods, or when you are implementing a class that is not yet complete.
You can use it to do test-driven development when you initially write a failing test that calls a method that is not implemented yet, which you can then implement and fix the failing test.
Another scenario when I saw it being used was in coding assignments that are part of homework.
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Testing your code is a great way to check whether you have implemented everything correctly. No matter how much you try, no matter how hard you analyze all the cases, sometimes, just the smallest mistake can lead to a big problem which could have maybe been avoided writing tests.
When you write tests, you are obviously not going to use data from production. We need to use some dummy data that does not belong to anyone who is actually using the project. This is called faking the data.
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Since you don’t have a predefined type for a variable in Python, you may notice a lot of bugs that can arise. As such, it is very important that you pay a lot of attention in cases when you have to make sure that you are using the correct type of variable.
This can also be the case when you expect a variable to be a number, but you get a string or any other type instead.
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There can be cases when you may need to find the difference between 2 sets in Python. If you do not remember from high school, the difference between 2 sets means that we get the elements from the first set that are not in the second set.
We can do that quite easily in Python using the minus operator.
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If your project is in some ways connected to a third-party API, then you are probably going to need to handle some JSON data.
In case you do not know what it means, it represents the most commonly used data format that is used to exchange data.
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If you happen to need to concatenate a string with itself multiple times, you may think to actually write a loop and do the concatenation in that way:
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