Tag Archives: Python 101

Python Decorators, more

20 Monday Oct 2025

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Last time I explored a number of useful Python decorators. The post was a revisit to a topic I first posted about five years ago [see Python Decorators, part 1 and Python Decorators, part 2]. Back then I didn’t really know what to do with decorators, but I could see they were useful.

Since then, I’ve found many applications for them, hence the revisit to the topic. In this post, we’ll continue looking at useful applications. If nothing else, they may provide some ideas for decorators of your own.

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Python Decorators, redux

13 Monday Oct 2025

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I wrote about Python decorators five years ago. [See Python Decorators, part 1 and Python Decorators, part 2] At the time, they were new to me, and I hadn’t thought of good use cases for them. Or really, even just good ways to use them.

But that changed during the last five years as I’ve had occasions to actually use decorators in code. They are extremely handy in certain situations. Today’s post takes a more useful look at Python decorators.

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The Python Turtle

30 Monday Sep 2024

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Some of you may have encountered the Logo programming language or one of its many offshoots. A memorable aspect of Logo was its use of turtle graphics — a form of vector graphics similar to pen plotters. Notably, turtle graphics features a relative drawing cursor.

Standard Python includes a turtle graphics module. It doesn’t have a huge production value (there’s no easy way to save an image, for instance), but it can be fun to play with.

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Python Descriptors, part 2

18 Wednesday Oct 2023

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Python has the useful notion of descriptor objects, which give object attributes control over how they are accessed. Descriptors enable calculated-on-the-fly attribute values and can prevent or control modification of data values.

The previous post covered the basics. In this post, I’ll dig deeper into Python descriptors with some more involved examples. This post assumes the basics covered in the previous post.

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Python Descriptors, part 1

17 Tuesday Oct 2023

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Python has the useful notion of descriptor objects as well as the built-in property() function to make using them in the most common cases — read-only and calculated instance attributes — quite easy.

In this post I’ll explore Python descriptors with lots of examples demonstrating how to use them. Descriptors are an important aspect in understanding Python and using it effectively.

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Python String Translate

13 Thursday Oct 2022

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Python str instances have many useful methods. I use strip, split, startswith, and others, quite a lot, for instance. One method I haven’t had reason to use so far is translate. It takes a dictionary argument and uses it to map the existing string to a new string.

It’s flexible and useful, so it’s worth knowing how to use.

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Loving the Lambda

15 Saturday Jan 2022

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One part of Python I especially appreciate is lambda functions. While I’ve never pursued functional programming, I do like many things about it, particularly the notion of functions as native data objects. Programming with functional objects opens new vistas. Most languages handle it one way or another, but languages make it natural.

Python’s lambda is such a facility, and I use it often. This week I finally got around to writing a lambda function I’ve been meaning to for a long time, and it’s my new favorite. I thought I’d share it along with some of my other “one-liners”…

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Python Tokenize

03 Friday Dec 2021

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Recently I thought to myself, “Hey self… Although I’ve never looked into them, I know Python has tools for parsing Python code. I wonder if they might make generating syntax-highlighted HTML pages of Python scripts pretty easy?”

I found the help page for the tokenize module, and the introduction says it’s “useful for implementing ‘pretty-printers,’ including colorizers for on-screen displays.” That sounds like a strong yes.

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Python Generators, part 3

24 Wednesday Nov 2021

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In the last two posts I’ve explored Python generator functions. The first post went over the basics and showed how they return an iterable object usable in for-loops and list constructors. The second post explored how generator functions work in more detail.

This time I’ll wrap it up with some examples that are a bit more involved. If Python generators were a mystery before these three posts, I hope you feel more comfortable with them after!

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Python Generators, part 2

23 Tuesday Nov 2021

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Last time I began exploring Python generator functions. I mostly covered their basic function as iterables, and why they’re good in for-loops. They’re also good for infinite lists. Much of their value lies in how they defer processing an item until it is actually asked for.

This time I’ll dig into the send method, which allows sending messages to a running generator. I’ll also introduce the yield from statement, which allows us to wrap a generator with another function that also acts like a generator.

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