In January 2024, Python 3.13.0a3 was released! With several exciting features, improvements, and optimizations, this release is the third of six planned alpha releases. During the alpha phase, features may be added up until the start of the beta phase on May 7. This is a pre-release, and you shouldn’t use it for production environments. However, it’s a great way to try out some new and exciting language features. The steering council had its elections last December, and the Python […]

When you’re doing string interpolation in your Python code, you often need to format the interpolated values to meet some formatting requirements. To do this, Python provides what is known as the format mini-language, which defines the syntax of a format specifier. Perhaps you’re comfortable working with strings, but you want to take even more control of them. With proficiency in the format mini-language, you’ll be able to use format specifiers to do things like formatting numbers as currency values, […]

If you’re writing numeric Python code, Numba can be a great way to speed up your program. By compiling a subset of Python to machine code, Numba lets you write for loops and other constructs that would be too slow in normal Python. In other words, it’s similar to Cython, C, or Rust, in that it lets you write compiled extensions for Python. Numba code isn’t always as fast as it could be, however. This is where profiling is useful: […]

Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: Raising and Handling Python Exceptions A Python program terminates as soon as it encounters an error. In Python, an error can be a syntax error or an exception. In this tutorial, you’ll see what an exception is and how it differs from a syntax error. After that, you’ll learn about raising exceptions and making […]

If you’ve ever come across a standard string literal prefixed with either the lowercase letter r or the uppercase letter R, then you’ve encountered a Python raw string: Although a raw string looks and behaves mostly the same as a normal string literal, there’s an important difference in how Python interprets some of its characters, which you’ll explore in this tutorial. Notice that there’s nothing special about the resulting string object. Whether you declare your literal value using a prefix […]

One of Python’s most distinctive features is the list comprehension, which you can use to create powerful functionality within a single line of code. However, many developers struggle to fully leverage the more advanced features of list comprehensions in Python. Some programmers even use them too much, which can lead to code that’s less efficient and harder to read. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll understand the full power of Python list comprehensions and know how to use their […]

Do you use NumPy, Pandas, or scikit-learn and want to get faster results? Nvidia has created GPU-based replacements for each of these with the shared promise of extra speed. For example, if you visit the front page of NVidia’s RAPIDS project, you’ll see benchmarks showing cuDF, a GPU-based Pandas replacement, is 15× to 80× faster than Pandas! Unfortunately, while those speed-ups are impressive, they are also misleading. GPU-based libraries might be the answer to your performance problems… or they might […]