10 Time-Saving Python One-Liners

Lazy Code
2 min readDec 28, 2022

--

Photo by Fotis Fotopoulos on Unsplash

Python is a powerful and versatile programming language that is known for its readability and simplicity. One way to make your Python code even more concise and efficient is to use one-liners, which are single lines of code that perform a specific task. In this post, we’ll explore ten Python one-liners that can save you time and make your code more readable. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced Python developer, these one-liners are sure to come in handy in your projects. So let’s get started!

  1. Swapping variables
a, b = b, a

This one-liner allows you to swap the values of two variables a and b in a single line of code.

2. Merging two dictionaries

d1.update(d2)

This one-liner merges the key-value pairs of the dictionary d2 into the dictionary d1.

3. Finding the intersection of two lists

set(list1) & set(list2)

This one-liner returns a set containing the elements that are present in both list1 and list2.

4. Reversing a string

string[::-1]

This one-liner returns a new string that is the reverse of the original string.

5. Sorting a dictionary by value

sorted(d.items(), key=lambda x: x[1])

This one-liner returns a new list of the key-value pairs in the dictionary d, sorted by value.

6. Flattening a list of lists

[item for sublist in list_of_lists for item in sublist]

This one-liner flattens a list of lists into a single list by iterating over the sub lists and appending each item to the resulting list

7. Removing duplicates from a list

list(set(items))

This one-liner converts the list items to a set, which removes any duplicates, and then converts it back to a list.

8. Counting the frequency of elements in a list

from collections import Counter
Counter(items)

This one-liner uses the Counter class from the collections module to count the frequency of each element in the list items.

9. Zipping and unzipping lists

zipped = zip(list1, list2)
unzipped = zip(*zipped)

The zip function combines the elements of two or more lists into a single list of tuples. The * operator is used to "unzip" a list of tuples back into separate lists.

10. Generating a range of numbers

range(start, stop, step)

This one-liner generates a sequence of numbers from start to stop, incrementing by step each time.

--

--

Lazy Code

Hi there! I'm Rasla😉, and I write about Programming and Tech Concepts on Medium. Thanks for visiting my page.