Introduction Sooner or later string formatting becomes a necessary evil for most programmers. More so in the past before the thick client GUI era, but the need to have a specific string representation is still a common enough use case. My first introduction was back in college when I had an old-school prof that had a impure love for making us write Java console applications with neurotic specifications for outputting with the printf(…) function. One thing that held true then […]

What is Python zlib The Python zlib library provides a Python interface to the zlib C library, which is a higher-level abstraction for the DEFLATE lossless compression algorithm. The data format used by the library is specified in the RFC 1950 to 1952, which is available at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1950.txt. The zlib compression format is free to use, and is not covered by any patent, so you can safely use it in commercial products as well. It is a lossless compression format […]

What is Crontab Cron is a software utility that allows us to schedule tasks on Unix-like systems. The name is derived from the Greek word “Chronos”, which means “time”. The tasks in Cron are defined in a crontab, which is a text file containing the commands to be executed. The syntax used in a crontab is described below in this article. Python presents us with the crontab module to manage scheduled jobs via Cron. The functions available in it allow […]

Just about every year is a good year to be investing in Python learning, whether you are a beginner or an expert. Employment opportunities are opening for Python developers in fields beyond traditional web development. An IBM blog post reports that Python is now the dominant language in many data science and machine learning careers. We charted data from DataScienceCentral to see how well Python is doing in this new field. Here is the result. As you can see, it […]