Brad Morton

Both Python versions 2 and 3 provide several helpful string methods that let you find the string’s contents.  Here’s how to use them. The functions in this article are useful if you want to validate user input – for example, you may want to check that a user-inputted string is a valid number before converting it to a number variable to prevent errors and warn the user that they need to try again. isdigit() and isalpha() are commonly used methods to identify a string’s contents, but … Read more

This article will show you how to round numbers up, down, and to the nearest 1, 10 100 (or any number) in the Python programming language. Truncation vs. Rounding Truncation isn’t technically rounding, but it serves a similar purpose, so I’ll include it here. It’s the simplest way to shorten a number – just cutting off the characters at the end until it’s in the format you require. Rounding gets the nearest number, whereas truncation cuts off digits from the number. For example: To round 2.9 to … Read more

This article will outline several methods which can be used to check that a file exists/is readable in the Python programming language. You may wish to check whether a file exists before reading or writing to it to reduce the number of alerts you need to display to the user or to make sure you aren’t accidentally overwriting an existing file (or a combination of both, letting the user know a file already exists and giving them a choice to overwrite it). Using pathlib to Check if … Read more

This article explores several ways to remove duplicate items from lists in the Python programming language. Using The dict.fromkeys() Method To Remove Duplicates From a List in Python This is the fastest way to remove duplicates from a list in Python. However, the order of the items in the list is not preserved. The fromkeys() method creates a dictionary (a collection of key:value pairs) with keys from a supplied sequence of elements (in this case, a list). As a dictionary cannot contain duplicate keys, they are removed. … Read more

This article will detail how to use the ‘accumulate()’ function in Python and provide some easy-to-follow example code. The accumulate() function in Python will process an iterable (iterables are things like lists, dictionaries, sets, or tuples – collections containing items which can be looped over) – returning the accumulated sum of the value of each item or running a given function on each item. The value of the accumulated value is stored for each step and returned with the result. The syntax and code in this article are written for … Read more