The GITS Blog

I've released version 0.5 of my mailer python module for sending emails. Thanks to a patch from Douglas Mayle, this version makes it possible to send HTML emails with attachments (previous versions only let you do one or the other).

Project homepage
pypi page

A question on StackOverflow about converting kanji numbers (e.g. "五十五") into integers in C++ got me interested in solving this using Python.
The result is my kanjinums module, with a function kanji2num that will convert a string containing a kanji num to a Python integer.
Download the source distribution (kanjinums-0.1.zip)
Download the Windows installer (kanjinums-0.1.win32.exe)
Download the unit tests [...]

This post describes the conditional tee ("ctee") module I wrote to split a sequence into two generators, according to a filter function.
The problem
David Beazley has a great article about generator pipelining using Python. This is a technique for handling (potentially very large) streams of data in a flexible yet efficient way. As an example, here's [...]

Coming from C++ or Java to Python should bend your mind. If it doesn't, then you haven't learned Python yet — you're just writing C++ or Java in Python.
If you only knew a statically typed and compiled language like C++ or Java before, and learning Python hasn't changed the way you think about programming, then [...]

David Mertz's gnosis utilities include the module gnosis.xml.objectify, which makes parsing XML in python as simple as could be.

from gnosis.xml import objectify
xmltext = """<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root><first canned="true" yummy="false">spam</first><second>egg</second></root>"""
inst = objectify.make_instance(xmltext)
print "first:", inst.first.PCDATA
print "  canned:", inst.first.canned
print "  yummy:", inst.first.yummy
print "second:", inst.second.PCDATA
Output:

first: spam
  canned: true
  yummy: false
second: egg
I wanted a similarly simple way to write XML, so [...]

This weekend, I had a fairly common problem: given a sequence of elements and an element in that sequence, I needed to get the next element; if the element was the last in the sequence, then I needed the first element.
My first stab at a solution was pretty straightforward:

def item_after(elements, item):
    for i in [...]

I'm currently reading Expert Python Programming by Tarek Ziadé. I plan on writing a review once I'm done, but in the meantime the publishers over at Packt have kindly sent me an excerpt from the book to publish here.

Download "Writing a Package in Python" (PDF)

Python is very Unicode friendly, but there are still a few quirks that people new to the language (or not so new!) need to assimilate in order to use Unicode effectively.
To avoid going over old ground, for a primer please see this excellent article on using Unicode with Python. Here, I want to talk about [...]

The adapter pattern is often used in programming when you need to adapt one interface to another. Here's a simple generic adapter class that can adapt just about any interface to just about any other.

class Adapter(object):
    """
    Adapts an object by replacing methods.
    Usage:
    dog = Dog()
    dog = Adapter(dog, [...]

Unlike some mainstream languages like Java, you don't have to package everything into a class in Python. A class is a good tool when you want to package up state and behavior, but when all you've got is a bundle of related functionality, the module is the natural unit of packaging in Python.
In my opinion, [...]