11 Python Tricks To Show Off Your Advanced Skills

Let’s enjoy the elegance of Python

Python is an elegant language if you can use it in a Pythonic way.

But no matter how senior you are, it needs some time to really write code Pythonicly.

This article is to show you 11 Pythonic tricks to let your Python skills enter into a new realm.

Talk is cheap, let’s see the code now.

1. Destructuring Assignment in Python

Assigning values to variables is a basic operation of programming. Python has some syntax sugar to make the process more elegant.

Let’s see a simple example:

a, *mid, b = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
print(a, mid, b)
# 1 [2, 3, 4, 5] 6

As shown above, with the help of one asterisk, the mid variable receives the items in the middle as a list.

2. Use Zip Function To Aggregates Items

Python has an amazing built-in function called zip. As its name implies, the zip function aggregates items from different iterables, such as lists, tuples or sets, and returns an iterator.

3. Use Lambda Functions in Python Properly

If you like one-liners. Lambda functions are your friends. Let’s see a classic question here:

Give you a list as following, can you print all the odd numbers within it?

numbers = [1, 12, 37, 43, 51, 62, 83, 43, 90, 2020]

Simple. You only need one line of code:

4. Ignore Variables Using Underscores

Sometimes, a variable is useless and you don’t bother to give it a name, you can use an underscore to ignore it.

>>> L = [1,3,5,7]
>>> a, _, b, _ = L
>>> print(a, b)
1 5

5. Leverage the Power of List Comprehension

Again, if you’re a fan of Python one-liners. The list comprehension is something you must know. It has the power to convert multiple operations into one line of code:

6. Put a Placeholder

Sometimes, you need to define a function but haven’t figure out how to implement it yet, you can put a placeholder inside it:

def my_func():
    pass

Or a cuter way: 🙂

def my_func():
    ...

7. Handle Text Through Regular Expressions

The regular expression (regex) is a powerful tool to deal with characters/strings. Python’s built-in re module provides all functionalities of regex:

import re

txt = "Yang is so handsome!!!"
x = re.search("Elon", txt)
print(x)
#None

8. Map and Reduce in Python

There are two famous higher-order functions in Python: map() and reduce().

The map() function receives two parameters, one is a function and the other is Iterable. It applies the initialized function to each element of the sequence in turn, and returns the result as a new Iterator.

The reduce() method also has two parameters, one is a function and the other is Iterable. It applies a function to a sequence, this function must receive two parameters, reduce continues the result and performs the cumulative calculation with the next element of the sequence. Finally, it returns the result of the cumulative calculation.

9. Remove Unnecessary Spaces in a String Elegantly

This string handling trick combines the power of splits() and join():

10. The Easiest Way To Shallow Copy a List

The simplest way to shallow copy a list in Python is leveraging the feature of list slicing:

>>> a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
>>> b = a[:]
>>> b[0]=100
>>> b
[100, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
>>> a
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

11. Check the Last Expression’s Value in Interpreter

This is an interesting and small trick of Python Interpreter. We can use one underscore to simply get the last expression’s value.

>>> 5+6
11
>>> _
11

Go Further

Life is short, why not use Python?

If you would like to explore more details, don’t hesitate to check the list below: