Sorting strings in Python is something that you can almost take for granted if you do it all the time. Yet, it can become surprisingly tricky considering all the edge cases lurking in the vast Unicode standard. Understanding Unicode isn’t an easy feat, so prepare yourself for a whirlwind tour of surprising edge cases and effective ways of dealing with them. Note: In this tutorial, you’ll often use the term Unicode string to mean any string with non-Latin letters and […]

As the leaves turned yellow and fall set in, the Python community prepared for the release of Python 3.12 in early October. This new version of the most popular programming language brings several exciting new features, including better error messages and improvements to static typing. It also lays the groundwork for enhanced parallelism. Microsoft Excel is about to become a friendlier space for Pythonistas with the integration of the Python Editor, opening up new possibilities for those bridging the gap […]

In Python, a tuple is a built-in data type that allows you to create immutable sequences of values. The values or items in a tuple can be of any type. This makes tuples pretty useful in those situations where you need to store heterogeneous data, like that in a database record, for example. Through this tutorial, you’ll dive deep into Python tuples and get a solid understanding of their key features and use cases. This knowledge will allow you to […]

Python 3.12 was published on October 2, 2023. As usual, the new version comes out in October after lots of effort by volunteers worldwide. The new version comes with several new features and improvements that you’ll explore in this tutorial. You can also dive into the documentation to see a complete list of all changes. In this tutorial, you’ll learn about new features and improvements, like: Better error messages with helpful suggestions and guidance More expressive f-strings that are backed […]

Python’s support for static typing gradually improves with each new release of Python. The core features were in place in Python 3.5. Since then, there’ve been many tweaks and improvements to the type hinting system. This evolution continues in Python 3.12, which, in particular, simplifies the typing of generics. In this tutorial, you’ll: Use type variables in Python to annotate generic classes and functions Explore the new syntax for type hinting type variables Model inheritance with the new @override decorator […]

Now that you know what a Python subinterpreter is, you’ll take a look at what’s changing in the upcoming releases of CPython. Most of the subinterpreter changes are described in two proposals, PEP 684 and PEP 554. Only PEP 684 will make it into the 3.12 release. PEP 554 is scheduled for the 3.13 release but hasn’t been officially approved yet. Changes to the Global State and the GIL The main focus of PEP 684 is refactoring the internals of […]

The common advice when Python is too slow is to switch to a low-level compiled language like Cython or Rust. But what do you do if that code is too slow? At that point you might start thinking about parallelism: using multi-threading or multi-processing so you can take advantage of multiple CPU cores. But parallelism comes with its own set of complexities; at the very least, some algorithms can only really work in a single-threaded way. So what can you […]