Functions in Python are used to implement logic that you want to execute repeatedly at different places in your code. You can pass data to these functions via function arguments. In addition to passing arguments to functions via a function call, you can also set default argument values in Python functions. These default values are assigned to function arguments if you do not explicitly pass a parameter value to the given argument. Parameters are the values actually passed to function […]

The MS Word utility from Microsoft Office suite is one of the most commonly used tools for writing text documents, both simple and complex. Though humans can easily read and write MS Word documents, assuming you have the Office software installed, often times you need to read text from Word documents within another application. For instance, if you are developing a natural language processing application in Python that takes MS Word files as input, you will need to read MS […]

Introduction Unpacking in Python refers to an operation that consists of assigning an iterable of values to a tuple (or list) of variables in a single assignment statement. As a complement, the term packing can be used when we collect several values in a single variable using the iterable unpacking operator, *. Historically, Python developers have generically referred to this kind of operation as tuple unpacking. However, since this Python feature has turned out to be quite useful and popular, […]

Introduction Python’s print() function is typically used to display text either in the command-line or in the interactive interpreter, depending on how the Python program is executed. However, we can change its behavior to write text to a file instead of to the console. In this article, we’ll examine the many ways we can write to a file with the print() function. Redirecting a Python’s Script Output in the Terminal The quick and dirty way to redirect a Python script’s […]

Introduction The map(), filter() and reduce() functions bring a bit of functional programming to Python. All three of these are convenience functions that can be replaced with List Comprehensions or loops, but provide a more elegant and short-hand approach to some problems. Before continuing, we’ll go over a few things you should be familiar with before reading about the aforementioned methods: What is an anonymous function/method or lambda? An anonymous method is a method without a name, i.e. not bound […]