Some random Python hints I learned over the last week while writing on my first Django website (Note: All things mentioned here are in the official docs, but I haven’t noticed them before looking at code others have written):
If you want to have a tuple, better play it safe and write (“hello”,) instead of (“hello”). Since the braces can also be used to control the precedence of a statement, adding the extra “,” will make sure, that you really get a tuple, no matter what number of elements is in there.
Named groups is in my opinion one of the coolest things I’ve seen with RE done so far. I don’t know, if this also works in other languages, but it just makes regex much more readable if you have something like this:
import re
m = re.match(r'(?P<name>.*)','hello')
print m.group("name")
Something similar is possible within string substitutions:
print "Hello %(name)s"%{'name':'Horst'}
You give %s basically the name “name” and assign its value using the passed dict instead of a tuple. Details about this can be found here.
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