Ruby on Rails does a great job of parsing arrays in form data and populating a params hash, for quick and easy access in your controllers. For instance Gives you params[:item] # => ["item 1", "item 2"] Flask doesn't do this work f...

The documentation for Python's shutil.make_archive is very confusing. Considering that the arguments to this function only need to be source and destination, makes it even more frustrating to try and reason about. Here are the relevant docs from the p...

If you're working with SQLAlchemy, the best database driver for Python, and want to see only SQL syntax errors, you need to use the StatementError exception class. On it, is an attribute `orig`, that contains just the SQL syntax error... and not any data...

Here is a code snippet that demonstrates how to set up a __ManyToMany through__ relationship in Django. In Rails, the equivalent would be called a __has_many through__ association. If you set the __through__ argument on the ManyToManyField, Django wil...

When running raw SQL queries in Django you must include a primary key otherwise an invalid query exception is raised. Normally this is fine but when running more complex queries a primary key may not be available or even make sense. There is a simple ...

Here is a quick code snippet showing how to send email via SMTP with Postmark without any dependencies. It assumes you are using Heroku and have added the addon. But if not just make sure your api keys are set as environment vars. from os import envir...

There are a lot of practical uses for automating user behavior in a browser. Everything from testing your web application to logging into Twitter and auto following people. But first you have to install the tools. Here is everything you need to run yo...

This is how to reshape an array using Python without Numpy. This is a fairly simple task but it can be a little confusing to wrap your head around. I ran into this problem while working with Flask, working with array from form fields. I wanted to us...

Creating trigrams in Python is very simple trigrams = lambda a: zip(a, a[1:], a[2:]) trigrams(('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f')) # => [('a', 'b', 'c'), ('b', 'c', 'd'), ('c', 'd', 'e'), ('d', 'e', 'f')] You can generalize this a little bit more ...

To decorate an imported function in Python you would do something like this # in ./lib.py def function_name(): # function body And then in your program you could decorate it like this from lib import function_name function_name = decorat...

Here is how to get the string representation of a method in Python def my_method_name(): print "Hello World" my_method_name.__name__ # => 'my_method_name' Short and sweet!

Here is a quick and dirty way to destructure dictionaries in [Python] d = {'a':'Apple', 'b':'Banana','c':'Carrot'} a,b,c = [d[k] for k in ('a', 'b','c')] a == 'Apple' b == 'Banana' c == 'Carrot'

If you run into authentication failure when trying to upload packages Submitting dist/ to https://upload.pypi.org/legacy/ Upload failed (403): Invalid or non-existent authentication information. error: Upload failed (403): Invalid or non-existent...

There are a few 3rd party modules that do this sort of thing. But there is a pretty solution using out of the box Python functionality. You don't have to install any dependencies if you use the `re` module. import re text = ' asdfladf ljklasfj 2324...

I wrote my first Python package over the weekend. It is a simple package that adds a basic blog API to an existing Flask application. It's called `command_line_blog` and is available [on Github](https://github.com/seanbehan/command_line_blog) and [on ...

The `request.form` object is an immutable dictionary. An `ImmutableMultiDict` object to be exact. Immutable means that you cannot change its values. It's frozen. However, you might want to change the values. Say for instance, creating a slug from a ti...

You can use string interpolation in combination with a dictionary for simple formatting. print "My name is %(name)s and I have $%(change)0.2f in change in my pocket!" % { 'name': 'Sean', 'change': 00.23 } # My name is Sean and I have $0.23 in chang...

You might have to append the path of the Postgres.app bin directory to your path in order to install the Python driver for Posgres. export PATH=$PATH:/Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/bin To find the location of the application try this ...

It's a little convoluted. Seeing as it's a pretty common thing you use when programming computers one might think that there would be a quick and easy method for it. But from what I can tell there isn't. So here is a snippet that will give you a *nix Epoc...

There is annoying line wrap issue present after installing iPython on OS X Mavericks for the first time. The issue has to do with readline being missing. To fix the problem uninstall iPython, install readline and then install iPython. pip uninstall ip...

Sometimes you want to see JSON from the command line. I'm sure there are better tools for the job, but here is a little snippet you can throw in your ~/.bash_profile. function json { curl -s "$1" | python -mjson.tool; } Usage json https://g...

If you thought you had installed matplotlib only to find this File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/matplotlib-0.91.1-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg/matplotlib/numerix/__init__.py", line 166, in __import__('ma', g, l) File "/Library/Python/2.6/...

Download First install mod_python for Apache and then restart/reload the server. apt-get install libapache2-mod-python /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload apache2ctl restart Next grab the web.py framework from webpy.org. You can grab the tar or use easy_in...

import hashlib print hashlib.sha1("My wonderful string").hexdigest() print hashlib.md5("My other wonderful string").hexdigest()

class Bar(): def __init__(self, **args): for key in args: self.__dict__[key] = args[key] b = Bar(fullname="Monty Python", email="me@monthpython.org") b.fullname #=> Monty Python b.email #=>me@montypython.org

import zlib regular_string = 'this is my string' compressed_string = zlib.compress(regular_string) decompressed_string = zlib.decompress(compressed_string) print compressed_string print decompressed_string

I don't do much python development. I really like the language and there are a lot of great software projects out there for it. Tornado, for example, is a fast non-blocking web server in python, just open sourced by Facebook that is the engine behind Frie...