In a recent post, I gave some code for counting the top n most frequent words in an arbitrary text file using itertools.groupby.
The code is written in a somewhat functional style. It's short and, dare I say, kind of elegant. But it turns out that this code is quite a bit slower than an imperative […]
itertools.groupby is a great tool for counting the numbers of occurrences in a sequence.
Here are some examples from the interactive interpreter.
A list of numbers
>>> # Create a random list of numbers
>>> from random import random
>>> numbers = [int(random() * 10) for x in range(20)]
>>> numbers
[8, 0, 3, 2, 3, 9, 8, 2, 8, 3, 0, […]
Some time around 1980, my elementary school classroom got a computer. While most of the other kids fooled around playing Hunt the Wumpus, my friend and I found the BASIC manual that came with the computer. We laboriously copied in the code to make a "robot" appear on the screen. After a lot of typos, […]
chardet is a fantastic module for finding the encoding of arbitrary byte strings. You can combine this with a check for a BOM to pretty reliably turn them into Unicode.
Edit: Thanks to Kirit's comment below, I added code to check for UTF-32.
import chardet
def bytes2unicode(bytes, errors='replace'):
"""Convert a byte string into Unicode.
First checks […]
[Edit]
By popular demand, I've added a section on PyGTK. See bottom of post.
There are several platforms for programming Windows GUI applications in Python. Below I outline a few of them, with a simple "hello world" example for each. Where I've lifted the example from another site, there's a link to the source.
Tkinter
Tkinter is the ubiquitous […]
It's very easy to get up and running with Python, but programmers coming from other more verbose or procedural languages tend to write code that's not very pythonic — that is, it doesn't use Python idioms that experienced programmers use.
The problems with un-pythonic code are that it tends to be more verbose, more difficult to […]
I haven't been doing much blogging lately. Instead, I've been busy working and hacking. On the hacking side of things, I've been doing a partial rewrite of my big application, a translation-memory application written in C++.
The application is now about 10 years old, and over time and several releases it's grown more and more difficult […]
Want to write in txt spk like all the cool mobile-toting kids, but tired of figuring out which letters to leave out? No problem — just run your text through the handy to_txt_spk function!
>>> def to_txt_spk(words):
return "".join(c for c in words if c not in "aeiou")
>>> to_txt_spk("Impress your friends with your text speak […]
Just a quick note that I've released version 0.2 of my subdist module.
What is subdist?
subdist is a C Python extension that calculates fuzzy substring matches, based on Levenshtein distance.
subdist works purely with Unicode strings; calling one of its functions with a non-Unicode string will raise an error.
What's new in version 0.2?
Version 0.2 adds a get_score […]
Alex Martelli has a great quote on optimization in Python in a Nutshell:
Start by designing, coding, and testing your application in Python, using available extension modules if they save you work. This takes much less time than it would with a classic compiled language. Then benchmark the application to find out if the resulting code […]
Comments(2)