Short (and useful) python snippets [closed]

In spirit of the existing "what's your most useful C/C++ snippet" - thread:

Do you guys have short, monofunctional Python snippets that you use (often) and would like to share with the StackOverlow Community? Please keep the entries small (under 25 lines maybe?) and give only one example per post.

I'll start of with a short snippet i use from time to time to count sloc (source lines of code) in python projects:

# prints recursive count of lines of python source code from current directory
# includes an ignore_list. also prints total sloc

import os
cur_path = os.getcwd()
ignore_set = set(["__init__.py", "count_sourcelines.py"])

loclist = []

for pydir, _, pyfiles in os.walk(cur_path):
    for pyfile in pyfiles:
        if pyfile.endswith(".py") and pyfile not in ignore_set:
            totalpath = os.path.join(pydir, pyfile)
            loclist.append( ( len(open(totalpath, "r").read().splitlines()),
                               totalpath.split(cur_path)[1]) )

for linenumbercount, filename in loclist: 
    print "%05d lines in %s" % (linenumbercount, filename)

print "\nTotal: %s lines (%s)" %(sum([x[0] for x in loclist]), cur_path)

I like using any and a generator:

if any(pred(x.item) for x in sequence):
    ...

instead of code written like this:

found = False
for x in sequence:
    if pred(x.n):
        found = True
if found:
    ...

I first learned of this technique from a Peter Norvig article.

Initializing a 2D list

While this can be done safely to initialize a list:

lst = [0] * 3

The same trick won’t work for a 2D list (list of lists):

>>> lst_2d = [[0] * 3] * 3
>>> lst_2d
[[0, 0, 0], [0, 0, 0], [0, 0, 0]]
>>> lst_2d[0][0] = 5
>>> lst_2d
[[5, 0, 0], [5, 0, 0], [5, 0, 0]]

The operator * duplicates its operands, and duplicated lists constructed with [] point to the same list. The correct way to do this is:

>>> lst_2d = [[0] * 3 for i in xrange(3)]
>>> lst_2d
[[0, 0, 0], [0, 0, 0], [0, 0, 0]]
>>> lst_2d[0][0] = 5
>>> lst_2d
[[5, 0, 0], [0, 0, 0], [0, 0, 0]]

The only 'trick' I know that really wowed me when I learned it is enumerate. It allows you to have access to the indexes of the elements within a for loop.

>>> l = ['a','b','c','d','e','f']
>>> for (index,value) in enumerate(l):
...     print index, value
... 
0 a
1 b
2 c
3 d
4 e
5 f

zip(*iterable) transposes an iterable.

>>> a=[[1,2,3],[4,5,6]]
>>> zip(*a)
    [(1, 4), (2, 5), (3, 6)]

It's also useful with dicts.

>>> d={"a":1,"b":2,"c":3}
>>> zip(*d.iteritems())
[('a', 'c', 'b'), (1, 3, 2)]

Short (and useful) python snippets [closed]

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