15 Python tips and tricks, so you don’t have to look them up on Stack Overflow

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Tired of searching on Stack Overflow every time you forget how to do something in Python? Me too!

Here are 15 python tips and tricks to help you code faster!

(1) Swapping values

x, y = 1, 2
print(x, y)
x, y = y, x
print(x, y)

(2) Combining a list of strings into a single one

sentence_list = ["my", "name", "is", "George"]
sentence_string = " ".join(sentence_list)
print(sentence_string)

(3) Splitting a string into a list of substrings

sentence_string = "my name is George"
sentence_string.split()
print(sentence_string)

(4) Initialising a list filled with some number

[0]*1000 # List of 1000 zeros 
[8.2]*1000 # List of 1000 8.2's

(5) Merging dictionaries

x = {'a': 1, 'b': 2}
y = {'b': 3, 'c': 4}
z = {**x, **y}

(6) Reversing a string

name = "George"
name[::-1]

(7) Returning multiple values from a function

def get_a_string():
    a = "George"
    b = "is"
    c = "cool"
    return a, b, c
sentence = get_a_string()
(a, b, c) = sentence

(8) List comprehension

a = [1, 2, 3]
b = [num*2 for num in a] # Create a new list by multiplying each                                 element in a by 2

(9) Iterating over a dictionary

m = {'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'c': 3, 'd': 4} 
for key, value in m.items():
    print('{0}: {1}'.format(key, value))

(10) Iterating over list values while getting the index too

m = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']
for index, value in enumerate(m):
    print('{0}: {1}'.format(index, value))

(11) Initialising empty containers

a_list = list()
a_dict = dict()
a_map = map()
a_set = set()

(12) Removing useless characters on the end of your string

name = "  George "
name_2 = "George///"
name.strip() # prints "George"
name_2.strip("/") # prints "George"

(13) Find the most frequent element in a list

test = [1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 2, 3, 1, 4, 4, 4]
print(max(set(test), key = test.count))

(14) Check the memory usage of an object

import sys
x = 1
print(sys.getsizeof(x))

(15) Convert a dict to XML

from xml.etree.ElementTree import Element
def dict_to_xml(tag, d):
    '''
    Turn a simple dict of key/value pairs into XML
    '''
    elem = Element(tag)
    for key, val in d.items():
        child = Element(key)
        child.text = str(val)
        elem.append(child)
    return elem

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