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 […]