This has got to be a silly question... but googling didn't actually help. Extra kudos for pycharm enabled answers. :)
I need a simple little UDP echo server (spare me the twisted advertisements please, this is a throw away thing, I just need to use it to peek at what a little embedded gadget is broadcasting). So I find section 21.21 of the Python 3 reference manual. It's a simple example that does exactly what I want.
But the same document also mentions a DatagramRequestHandler class. But there's no further explanation on how that differs from its parent class, or what it provides. I had really hoped that when I imported said class, that pycharm would somehow display a helpful popup for it, but I'm unable to discover such a thing.
Do I assume correctly, that I should just go find the source in my (macosx) install and look directly at that? is there a pattern for how people do that? My actual question here, is actually less about DatagramRequestHandler, and more about the general pattern, because this obviously will happen else where in the base docs.
(context: my traditional experience is with Smalltalk image based environments, where you can always just jump from class to class to class, and navigate quickly from application code all the way to the bowels, as a sort of exploratory way of learning and discovery)
There is an option to navigate to the declaration of the name under your cursor, Navigate->Declaration (shortcut CTRL+b in my keymap).
If you have such a question there are three things to do:
google it (eg. python DatagramRequestHandler)
use the help function in a interactive python session. eg.
import socketserver; help(socketserver.DatagramRequestHandler)
look into the code
Most of the time the first option is enough (this time I found only something in german). The result from the second option is in this "example" not so interesting or useful. So you have to use try third option.
I'm trying to get a list of craigslist states and their associates urls. Don't worry, I have no intentions of spaming, if you're wondering what this is for see the * below.
What I'm trying to extract begins the line after 'us states' and is the next 50 < li >'s. I read through html.parser's docs and it seemed too low level for this, more aimed at making a dom parser or syntax highlighting/formatting in an ide as opposed to searching which makes me think my best bet is using re's. I would like to keep myself contained to what's in the standard library just for the sake of learning. I'm not asking for help writing a regular expression, I'll figure that out on my own, just making sure there's not a better way to do this before spending the time on that.
*This is my first program or anything beyond simple python scripts. I'm making a c++ program to manage my posts and remind me when they've expired in case I want to repost them, and a python script to download a list of all of the US states and cities/areas in order to populate a combobox in the gui. I really don't need it, but I'm aiming to make this 'production ready'/feature complete both as a learning exercise and to create a portfolio to possibly get a job. I don't know if I'll make the program publicly available or not, there's obvious potential for misuse and is probably against their ToS anyway.
There is xml.etree an XML Parser available in the Python Standard library itself. You should not using regex for parsing XMLs. Go the particular node where you find the information and extract the links from that.
Use lxml.html. It's the best python html parser. It supports xpath!
screenshot http://www.activestate.com/padfiles/komodo_edit/komodo_edit_linux.png
See the indent guides? They're damn helpful when writing Python code. Any chance I could get something similar for gedit? I wouldn't mind having to write my own plugin, as long as it's in Python... So:
Is there a plugin for this which works with gedit?
If not, would it be possible to write one in Python.
There's a huge list of GEdit plugins here:
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gedit/Plugins
I haven't looked through them in a while, but I don't remember any implementing indentation guides. Many plugins are written in Python, so there are some good examples if you want to implement your own.
I am trying to learn Python and referencing the documentation for the standard Python library from the Python website, and I was wondering if this was really the only library and documentation I will need or is there more? I do not plan to program advanced 3d graphics or anything advanced at the moment.
Edit:
Thanks very much for the responses, they were very useful. My problem is where to start on a script I have been thinking of. I want to write a script that converts images into a web format but I am not completely sure where to begin. Thanks for any more help you can provide.
For the basics, yes, the standard Python library is probably all you'll need. But as you continue programming in Python, eventually you will need some other library for some task -- for instance, I recently needed to generate a tone at a specific, but differing, frequency for an application, and pyAudiere did the job just right.
A lot of the other libraries out there generate their documentation differently from the core Python style -- it's just visually different, the content is the same. Some only have docstrings, and you'll be best off reading them in a console, perhaps.
Regardless of how the other documentation is generated, get used to looking through the Python APIs to find the functions/classes/methods you need. When the time comes for you to use non-core libraries, you'll know what you want to do, but you'll have to find how to do it.
For the future, it wouldn't hurt to be familiar with C, either. There's a number of Python libraries that are actually just wrappers around C libraries, and the documentation for the Python libraries is just the same as the documentation for the C libraries. PyOpenGL comes to mind, but it's been a while since I've personally used it.
As others have said, it depends on what you're into. The package index at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ has categories and summaries that are helpful in seeing what other libraries are available for different purposes. (Select "Browse packages" on the left to see the categories.)
One very common library, that should also fit your current needs, is the Python Image Library (PIL).
Note: the latest version is still in beta, and available only at Effbot site.
If you're just beginning, all you'll need to know is the stuff you can get from the Python website. Failing that a quick Google is the fastest way to get (most) Python answers these days.
As you develop your skills and become more advanced, you'll start looking for more exciting things to do, at which point you'll naturally start coming across other libraries (for example, pygame) that you can use for your more advanced projects.
It's very hard to answer this without knowing what you're planning on using Python for. I recommend Dive Into Python as a useful resource for learning Python.
In terms of popular third party frameworks, for web applications there's the Django framework and associated documentation, network stuff there's Twisted ... the list goes on. It really depends on what you're hoping to do!
Assuming that the standard library doesn't provide what we need and we don't have the time, or the knowledge, to implement the code we reuse 3rd party libraries.
This is a common attitude regardless of the programming language.
If there's a chance that someone else ever wanted to do what you want to do, there's a chance that someone created a library for it. A few minutes Googling something like "python image library" will find you what you need, or let you know that someone hasn't created a library for your purposes.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I noticed that many people here use TextMate for coding on OS X. I've recently started using it, and although I like its minimalistic interface, it makes it harder to stumble upon cool features if you don't know what you're looking for.
So, what feature have you found most helpful for coding (mainly in Python)? Are there any third-party bundles I should know about, besides what's included?
Don't neglect the 'mate' command line tool. You can use it to pipe output into TextMate, so if you do the following...
diff file1.py file2.py | mate
...it will not only open in TextMate, but it is smart enough to know that you're looking at a diff and highlight lines on screen.
TextMate's SVN integration is great; it also seems to have bundles for some other version control systems as well.
Add GetBundle to browse the bundle repository. I found the jQuery bundle through it and it's very handy.
As others have mentioned, rolling your own bundle for frequently used snippets is very helpful. If you have some snippets that are specific to a project or framework, you might want to prefix all of them with a common letter to keep the namespace tidy.
Holding down option while dragging allows you to highlight a block of text. If you type while the highlight is active, your keystrokes appear on multiple lines.
Being able to write simple commands in any scripting language and bind them to a context-specific hotkey.
The Navigation menu commands Go to File (Command + T) and Go to Symbol (Command + Shift + T) are both extremely helpful.
Go to File, which works when you have a project open, lets you type any part of the file name to see only files that match what you've typed.
Go to Symbol has the same type-to-filter interface, but operates on what I'd call the basic block elements of your document. For example, if you're editing a class, Go to Symbol works on the method names, but in a CSS document, you'll be searching on your selectors. It's pretty awesome.
I mention some in a review on Boagworld, I find the snippets, project manager, columnar editing (hold down option while selecting stuff or push it after having selected stuff) and CSS scopes for syntax.
I like the integrated HTML/XML Tidy. Cmd-shift-H is your friend.
Also, nice integration with a variety of scp/sftp clients.
My favourite two features are auto-completion (bound to ⎋ [esc]), and column editing (bound to ⌥ [alt]) both of these things save me quite a lot of time, and are definitely 'robot ninjas'.
The book linked above is also a really useful into to the power of TextMate, although it doesn't specifically mention python.
Don't forget "Drag commands".
They give you the ability to drag, say, an image into a blog.html document and will then upload it to the proper folder and insert the markup for you.
Here is another example of how you can expand further on drag commands if you pair TM up with QuickSilver.
(Disclaimer: I wrote the blog post I linked to there. I still think it's cool though.)
It is worth noting here that there is a Windows alternative to TextMate called E Text Editor. It does pretty much everything TextMate does (apart from macros, but the author is working on this, I think), and even - shock, horror - does some things better, such as the superb bundles editor, the bundles manager, and the branching undo history. Update: and now there's Snippet Pipes.
So, not exactly a useful feature of TextMate as such, but very useful to know if you're a fan of TextMate and you have to use Windows for whatever reason.
The ease of snippet creation.
It's trivial to create new snippets that can accomplish a lot using replacements, tabbing order, and regex substitutions. Quickly assigning these to the tab key for specific languages makes me more productive. And makes me worry about code bloat. :-)
For me the best features are:
Projects - I know every IDE under
the sun has this but TextMate makes
this useful for all sorts of editing
and text processing tasks, and
moreover makes navigating around
these projects easy without ever
lifting your hands from the
keyboard. This is huge for Rails or
Grails projects or large programming
projects with many modules.
The excellent syntax highlighting
and 'snippets' for myriad languages
and tools
The excellent scripting language
support (Being able to evaluate
chunks of Ruby and the like with a
single key chord)
The built in Blogging bundle is
superb. I now use TextMate
exclusively for all my blog posts.
Columnar editing
The ability to use just about any
language or tool to extend TextMate,
Ruby, Perl, shell, name your poison.
An excellent mix of great Aqua GUI
support and excellent command line
support through the
mate and
commands, for
instance making it easy and pleasant
to use TextMate as your default
editor for your SCM.
Using snippets to expand into large, repetitive blocks of code and then using the tab key to move through and only edit the pieces I need to without having to use the mouse or arrow keys.
It's nice and lightweight and has all of the macros built-in for Ruby and let's you run Ruby code, or any other code for that matter just with a keystroke.
Check out ProjectPlus, it gives some useful options for the sidebar, it has SCM status badges for svn and git (though I find the git thing a bit buggy).
I like the fact that it can change the sidebar to an embedded panel on left or right (as opposed to the drawer that's default).
If, like me, you're borderline OCD when it comes to making code look neat, then Option+Cmd+] to line up all the assignments around the current line is awesome!
The mate command line tool is great, you can open an individual file or my favourite use of it is to open a directory of files as a project (e.g. mate .)
Checkout Zen Coding bundle . It gives you an awesome productivity boost to developing both HTML and CSS.