Introduction In this article we’re going to be taking a look at the try/except clause, and specifically how you can catch multiple exceptions in a single line, as well as how to use the suppress() method. Both of these techniques will help you in writing more accessible and versatile code that adheres to DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principles. Let’s start by looking at the problem: try: do_the_thing() except TypeError as e: do_the_other_thing() except KeyError as e: do_the_other_thing() except IndexError as […]

Introduction Selecting a random element or value from a list is a common task – be it for randomized result from a list of recommendations or just a random prompt. In this article, we’ll take a look at how to randomly select elements from a list in Python. We’ll cover the retrieval of both singular random elements, as well as retrieving multiple elements – with and without repetition. Selecting a Random Element From Python List The most intuitive and natural […]

Introduction Python is a very high-level programming language, and it tends to stray away from anything remotely resembling internal data structure. Because of this, we usually don’t really need indices of a list to access its elements, however, sometimes we desperately need them. In this article, we will go over different approaches on how to access an index in Python’s for loop. How to Access Index in Python’s for Loop? The easiest, and most popular method to access the index […]

Introduction When working with dates, oftentimes, you’d like to know if a given date comes before or after another date. We can get these answers by comparing dates. In this article, we will learn how to use the Python datetime module to create and compare both naive (without timezone info) and aware (with timezone info) dates. To compare the dates, we will use the comparison operators in Python: , ==, =, !=. Note: The datetime module has two methods for […]

Introduction File manipulation is one of the most important skills to master in any programming language, and doing it correctly is of utmost importance. Making a mistake could cause an issue in your program, other programs running on the same system, and even the system itself. Possible errors can occur due to the parent directory not existing, or by other programs changing files in the file system at the same time, creating something that is called a race condition. A […]

Introduction In this article we’ll be taking a look at Global and Non-Local Variables in Python and how you to use them to avoid issues when writing code. We’ll be starting off with a brief primer on variable scopes before we launch into the how and why of using global and non-local variables in your own functions. Scopes in Python Before we can get started, we first have to touch on scopes. For those of you who are less familiar, […]