2. Idioms

Dataflow

1. Chained comparison operators

if x <= y and y <= z:
  print('ok')

Better

if x <= y <= z:
  # do something

---

2. Ternary operator

value = 0
if cond:
  value = 1

Better

value = 1 if cond else 0

Intuitively it's like how we write in maths, f(x) = |x| = x if x > 0 else -x

---

3. or operator

if x:
  y = x
else:
  y = 'fallback'

Better: use or

y = x or 'fallback'

or returns the first operand if the first operand evaluates to True, and the second operand if the first operand evaluates to False. Examples:

'' or 'default' # 'default'
0 or 1 # 1
None or 0 # 0
[] or [3] # [3]
None or [] # []
False or 0 # 0

---

---

Check existence in a collection

if city == 'Nairobi' or city == 'Kampala' or city == 'Lagos':
  found = True

Better: use in keyword

city = 'Nairobi'
found = city in {'Nairobi', 'Kampala', 'Lagos'}

Here we used a set of cities, though we could also have used

1. a tuple, ('Nairobi', 'Kampala', 'Lagos'), or
2. a list ['Nairobi', 'Kampala', 'Lagos']

Set will be advantageous when number of cities is very large. In summary, use in where possible:

1. Contains: if x in items
2. Iteration: for x in items

---

Concatenating strings

sentence = ['this','is','a','sentence']
sentence_str = ''
for word in sentence:
  sentence_str += word + '  '
sentence_str = sentence_str[:-1]
# 'this is a sentence'

Above code uses the Shlemiel the painter’s algorithm and is accidentaly quadratic 👎. Instead use join

' '.join(sentence)

---

Looping

Simple Looping

for i in range(len(my_list)):
  print(my_list[i])

Better 👇

for elem in my_list:
  print(elem)

---

Looping over a collection with indices

for i in range(len(my_list)):
  print(i, my_list[i])

Better: use enumerate

for idx, element in enumerate(my_list):
  print (idx, element)

enumerate returns an iterator

---

Looping backwards

colors = ['red', 'green', 'blue', 'yellow']

for i in range(len(colors)-1, -1, -1):
  print(colors[i])

Better: use slicing [::-1]

for color in colors[::-1]:
  print(color)

Even Better: use reversed 👌. It returns an iterator.

for color in reversed(colors):
  print(color)

---

Looping over two collections

names = ['raymond', 'rachel', 'matthew']
colors = ['red', 'green', 'blue', 'yellow']

n = min(len(names), len(colors))
for i in range(n):
  print(names[i], '--->', colors[i])

Better: use zip

for name, color in zip(names, colors):
  print(name, '--->', color)

zip too returns an iterator.

• Make (an iterable of) bigrams of items in iterable: zip(mylist, mylist[1:])

  words = 'A girl has no name'.split()
  bigrams = list(zip(words, words[1:]))
  # bigrams is [('A', 'girl'), ('girl', 'has'), ('has', 'no'), ('no', 'name')]

• Transpose an iterable of tuples: zip(*data)

  data = [(1, 2, 3), (4, 5, 6)]
  transposed = list(zip(*data))
  # transposed is [(1, 4), (2, 5), (3, 6)]

---

Summary: The iterators enumerate, zip, reversed are syntax goodies (syntactic sugar) that cover many usual cases to make code more readable and pretty.

---

Dict's default value: get

1. Default value for item not in dictionary

color_weights = {'blue': 1, 'green': 2, 'red': 3}
yellow_weight = color_value['yellow'] if 'yellow' in color_weights else -1

Better: use get

yellow_value = color_value.get('yellow', -1)

2. Counting with dictionaries

colors = ['red', 'green', 'red', 'blue', 'green', 'red']

d = {}
for color in colors:
    if color not in d:
        d[color] = 0
    d[color] += 1

# {'blue': 1, 'green': 2, 'red': 3}

Better

d = {}
for color in colors:
    d[color] = d.get(color, 0) + 1

Use collections 💪

from collections import Counter

Counter(colors)

---

Grouping

Use defaultdict

---

any function

Let's simulate an experiment to shuffle 'n' cards each with a unique label in 0...n-1, and then check if any k^th card's label is k.

We will use sample function from random module for that. sample is used for sampling with replacement; sample(range(n), n) is equivalent to shuffling the list 0...n-1.

from random import sample
idx_labels = enumerate(sample(range(n), n))

To proceed with the experiment:

for idx, label in idx_labels:
  if idx == label:
    print(True)
print(False)

Better: use any

if any(idx == label for idx, label in idx_labels):
  print(True)
else:
  print(False)

We could also have used a list instead of a generator: any([idx == label for idx, label in idx_labels]), but obviously generator-expression used above is memory-efficient.

---

The with statement

foo = open('/tmp/foo', 'w')
try:
  foo.write('sometext')
finally:
  foo.close()

👆code is equivalent to 👇. Use with

with open('/tmp/foo', 'w') as handle:
  handle.write('sometext')

---

Comprehensions

squares = list(map(lambda x: x**2, range(1,10)))
even_squares = list(map(lambda x: x**2, filter(lambda x: x % 2 == 0, range(1,10))))

List comprehensions 👇are more readable and pythonic! 🤘

squares = [x**2 for x in range(1,10)]
even_squares = [x**2 for x in range(1,10) if x % 2 == 0]

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Specialized tool beats a general purpose tool

Specialized tools usually outperform or are more accurate than general purpose tools

• math.sqrt(x) is more accurate than x ** 0.5
• math.log2() is exact for powers of two

  from math import log, log2
  all(log(2 ** x, 2) == x for x in range(100)) # False
  all(log2(2 ** x) == x for x in range(100)) # True

• In PySpark, key_value_rdd.countByKey() is way faster thankey_value_rdd.groupBy().mapValues(len).collect() because of less shuffling involved.