The standard Python interpreter lets you run scripts from files or interactively execute code on the fly in a so-called read-evaluate-print loop (REPL). While this is a powerful tool for exploring the language and discovering its libraries through instant feedback on your code inputs, the default REPL shipped with Python has several limitations. Luckily, alternatives like bpython offer a much more programmer-friendly and convenient experience. You can use bpython to experiment with your code or quickly test an idea without […]

If you want to do natural language processing (NLP) in Python, then look no further than spaCy, a free and open-source library with a lot of built-in capabilities. It’s becoming increasingly popular for processing and analyzing data in the field of NLP. Unstructured text is produced by companies, governments, and the general population at an incredible scale. It’s often important to automate the processing and analysis of text that would be impossible for humans to process. To automate the processing […]

Describe any image, then let a computer create it for you. What sounded futuristic only a few years ago has become reality with advances in neural networks and latent diffusion models (LDM). DALL·E by OpenAI has made a splash through the amazing generative art and realistic images that people create with it. OpenAI now allows access to DALL·E through their API, which means that you can incorporate its functionality into your Python applications. You’ll need some experience with Python, JSON, […]

Python’s in and not in operators allow you to quickly determine if a given value is or isn’t part of a collection of values. This type of check is common in programming, and it’s generally known as a membership test in Python. Therefore, these operators are known as membership operators. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to: Perform membership tests using the in and not in operators Use in and not in with different data types Work with operator.contains(), the […]

Getting the current time in Python is a nice starting point for many time-related operations. One very important use case is creating timestamps. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to get, display, and format the current time with the datetime module. To effectively use the current time in your Python applications, you’ll add a few tools to your belt. For instance, you’ll learn how to read attributes of the current time, like the year, minutes, or seconds. To make the […]

Upgrading to new software versions is work, and work that doesn’t benefit your software’s users. Users care about features and bug fixes, not how up-to-date you are. So it’s perhaps not surprising how many people still use Python 3.7. As of December 2022, almost 30% of packages downloaded from PyPI were for Python 3.7. This includes automated downloads as part of CI runs, so it doesn’t mean 3.7 is used in 30% of applications, but that’s still a lot of […]