python – Page 2 – Chad Dotson

Authorizing a twitter-bot

By chad August 16, 2015Programming, Programming Live BlogNo Comments

So last night I ran into a small issue, how to authorize a twitter bot to use an application without stubbing together a website and logging in with the bot account? The answer, this little script using twython: import twython app_key = raw_input("Your app key: ") app_secret = raw_input("Your app…

Virtualenvwrapper / Updating Tools

By chad August 15, 2015Programming Live Blog, TipsNo Comments

If you are using virtualenvwrapper with the default version of python on your system (OSX in particular) and I recommend updating pip and setuptools as part of your postmkvirtualenv hook. Just add the following line to YOURVIRTUALENVDIRECTORY/postmkvirtualenv. pip install -U pip setuptools

Don't use parse_requirements in your code

By chad August 15, 2015Programming, Programming Live BlogNo Comments

I just ran into trouble while building a setuptools package. Specifically, I was using pip.req.parse_requirements to process package dependencies from a requirements.txt file and noticed that upgrading pip would break my code. Upon further investigation, I found out that they(authors of pip) do not guarantee the api of their internal…

The Python "in" Operator – Theoretical vs Actual Time Complexity

By chad July 20, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, TipsNo Comments

Background Sometimes we may generate or retrieve a list, set or even dict when creating collection of things that we will be testing against. Theoretically a set, frozenset or dictionary should be the fastest (and equivalent) forms of storage for this operation. However, what I've found is that on some…

Python Logger

By chad June 29, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, Technology, TipsNo Comments

The Scenario This scenario illustrates two possible mistakes people make when using the python logging module. Analyze the following code and look for issues. try: ... except SomeException as e: logger.error("Some meaningful error message. message={0}".format(e.message)) So what is wrong with that? First and foremost, the code fails to use the…

PyCharm and Version Control

By chad June 6, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, TipsNo Comments

So, you want to add your PyCharm project files to a VCS but you constantly deal with problems because each of your team members have different names/locations for their project interpreter. There is a rather simple solution to this problem. Basically, at the project level, PyCharm only cares about the…

C-Style Unions And Python

By chad May 8, 2015ProgrammingNo Comments

So, you're creating a C Union (used to create a variant type) and writing it to a file, socket, etc and want to read that in Python. There are two ways to deal with this. Assume the following union definition in C typedef union { int i; unsigned int u;…

A Better AsyncTestCase for Python

By chad March 21, 2015Doing Things Better, ProgrammingNo Comments

If you need asynchronous support in python unit tests, there are a few possibilities. A simple google search points you to a few packages, one being tornado. Tornado's tornado.testing.AsyncTestCase seems straight-forward. However it does have a shortcoming: it's not thread-safe. Trying to use it with a thread will result in…

Automating Pylint with Gulp.js

By chad February 6, 2015Doing Things Better, Software Engineering, TipsNo Comments

Automating Pylint (and other Python Tasks) can be achieved with several viable python-based methods, but what if we used Gulp.js? The following code snippet gathers runs Pylint on the set of python files defined by pySource. var gulp = require('gulp'), shell = require('gulp-shell'); gulp.task("pylint", function() { log('Linting with pylint ->…

Generating JSON Documents From SQLite Databases In Python

By chad June 22, 2014Programming, Tips3 Comments

Special Note This article assumes that you do not wish to use a more sophisticated ORM tool such as SQLAlchemy. Some Setup Let's start with a Q&D sqlite database given the following sql. create table sample(column1 INTEGER, column2 TEXT, column3 TEXT, column4 REAL); insert into sample(column2, column2, column3, column4) values(1,…