Posts in December, 2016

I like to imagine components of a Python web framework as personalities. Here's how I would imagine a conversation between a typical view and template would go down:

View Here's that data I just looked up.

Template Don't like it.

View What's wrong with it?

Template Format's wrong.

View You can change the format if you like.

Template Don't wanna. You change it.

View OK. Fine. I'll change it for you.

Which is why I wanted Moya templates to be very capable in processing data, but still keep them designer friendly. If the template data is sane then the template should be able to deal with it, without going back to the back-end developer. continue reading…

I'd like to announce version 2.0.0 of PyFilesystem, which is now available on PyPi.

PyFilesystem is a Python module I started some time in 2008, and since then it has been very much a part of my personal standard library. I've used it in personal and professional projects, as have many other developers and organisations.

If you aren't familiar with PyFilesystem; it's an abstraction layer for filesystems. Essentially anything with files and directories (hard-drive, zip file, ftp server, network filesystems etc.) may be wrapped with a common interface. With it, you can write code that is agnostic as to where the files are physically located.

Here's a quick example that recursively counts the lines of code in a directory: continue reading…

It's not often I come across something in Python that surprises me. Especially in something as mundane as string operations, but I guess Python still has a trick or two up its sleeve.

Have a look at this string:

How many possible sub-strings are in s? To put it another away, how many values of x are there where the expression x in s is true?

Turns out it is 2.

2?

Yes, 2.

The empty string is in the string "A". In fact, it's in all the strings.

Turns out the empty string has been hiding every where in my code.

Not a complaint, I'm sure the rationale is completely sound. And it turned out to be quite useful. I had a couple of lines of code that looked something like this: continue reading…