Python

19 Sweet Python Syntax Sugar for Improving Your Coding Experience

Do more by less code

Yang Zhou
TechToFreedom
Published in
11 min readMar 30, 2023

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Python Syntax Sugar for Improving Your Coding Experience
Image from Wallhaven

Making a function work is one thing.

Implementing it with precise and elegant code is another.

As the Zen of Python mentioned, “beautiful is better than ugly.” A good programming language like Python will always provide appropriate syntax sugar to help developers write elegant code easily.

This article highlights 19 crucial syntax sugar in Python. The journey to mastery involves understanding and utilizing them skillfully.

Talk is cheap, let’s see the code.

1. Union Operators: The Most Elegant Way To Merge Python Dictionaries

There are many approaches to merging multiple dictionaries in Python, but none of them can be described as elegant until Python 3.9 was released.

For example, how can we merge the following three dictionaries before Python 3.9?

One of the methods is using for loops:

cities_us = {'New York City': 'US', 'Los Angeles': 'US'}
cities_uk = {'London': 'UK', 'Birmingham': 'UK'}
cities_jp = {'Tokyo': 'JP'}

cities = {}

for city_dict in [cities_us, cities_uk, cities_jp]:
for…

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