The python quiz has changed! We have replaced python questions with answers! And from those answers you'll find further links to even more information - forums where you can ask questions, training courses, longer articles, and more. [link to quiz index] ... If you really want the old quiz questions, you can find them here, here, here and here ... and with onward links to the possible answers to each question too.

Python or Lua - which should I use / learn?

"Should I learn and use Python or Lua" - a question to me. The questioner was perceptive, knowing that he shouldn't try to learn lots of languages at the same time, and that he should always limit ...

Football league tables - under old and new point system. Python program.

In 1981, football scoring for the top divisions of the league changed from 2 points for a win to 3 points for a win in the 1981 season [ref]. This was done to encourage positive play, and discourage ...

Some terms used in programming (Biased towards Python)

Some of the elements of your program Command - typically a keyword followed by series of parameters - a "unit" of shell / batch / Tcl programming (You don't really have commands in Python) ...

Dark mornings, dog update, and Python and Lua courses before Christmas

It's significantly darker each morning as we take Gypsy and Billy out for a morning walk. We're out well before sunrise now, which was at 07:29 on his first morning with us, it is at 08:04 today - ...

December courses - PHP, Python, Perl - and a weekend Lua course

Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It's good and has a very open license so you can use it widely - even within your commercial products - at no cost. That's made ...

Metaclasses (Python) and Metatables (Lua)

"A Metaclass (Python) or Metatable (Lua) adds extra code / data / behaviour to an object, table, or class." What does that mean? It means that I can define a behavior that I want to be shared, that ...

Python - current versions and implementations (CPython, Jython, IronPython etc)

Versions Python originated in 1988, I am told. Think back to decisions YOU made in 1988, and they may have been good ones at the time. But it's likely that a good decision such as "which camera ...

Python courses and Private courses - gently updating our product to keep it ahead of the game

It's remarkable how stable our courses and training have been over the years. After all, you don't want to learn to program in a language, and then invest significant resources in design and coding, ...

Python sets and frozensets - what are they?

A Python set is like a dictionary, but without a value being held. Quite often, I'll have a long list of names / places / skills / words and I want to make up a unique list - to produce a pulldown ...

Practical Extraction and Reporting - using Python and Extreme Programming

"We seem to be getting a lot of signups from Germany" - so said my fellow administrator on the First Great Western Coffee Shop forum. At first glance is something of a surprise, as this forum is ...

Testing your Python classes with the unittest package - how to

Python's unittest module - supplied within the base distribution - allows you to define and run a series of tests for a class or group of classes, and correlate the results, reporting any ...

Choosing your Python GUI - wx, Qt, Tk or GTK?

Python has no fewer that 4 GUIs (Graphics User Interfaces) in quite common use ... but none of them could be described as "prevelant", and in in case only a small proportion of Python users are making ...

Tkinter - an easy to use Python Graphic User Interface - introductory examples

Tkinter (tkinter from Python 3.0 - note the different case) is a graphic user interface (GUI) that's included with the Python distribution. It's a lightweight wrapper around the Tk Toolkit - ...

Python Packages - groupings of modules. An introduction

As your Python code grows in volume, you'll want to arrange it into subdirectories, with a mirroring mechanism within the language to let you have the extra heirarcy as you load the code from the ...

Python string formatting - the move from % to str.format

The % operator in Python has been a very clever and easy-to-use formatter, but has lacked the extensibility that's been incumbent on its structure and mirroring of the C sprintf function. Or - put ...

How can I do an FTP transfer in Python?

"If you think someone's probably done it before, they probably have .... and it's probably available to you" A good answer to many questions of the form "can I do xxxxx in Python?" Question today ...

Passing optional and named parameters to python methods

When you call a named block of code (a method or function), you'll wish to pass in originating values that are changed from one call / use to the next - these are commonly known as the parameters. If ...

A demonstration of how many Python facilities work together

Many of our demonstrations on the Well House Consultants site show individual features of a language - taken in isolaion to show you how they work. However, during a course we usually write further ...

Pressing ^C in a Python program. Also Progress Bar.

If you want to stop a user interrupt via ^C aborting your program, you can catch a KeyboardInterrupt in Python. There's an example [here] which I wrote earlier today. It also shows how important it ...

Python for loops - applying a temporary second name to the same object

If you write a for loop in Python to go through each element of a list, you assign an extra (temporary) name to each member of the list while within the loop. So than any changes made to the named ...

Moving from scripting to Object Orientation in Python

Using what's been described as the scripting idiom, a "scripter" will write a series of code steps which perform a task from top to bottom. For a job that only involves simple data manipulation (even ...

Formatting output in Python through str.format

Python's str.format method provides functionallity to convert values into string representations - typically for output. Taking (for example) the resukt or dividing 1 by 7 - a recurring decimal - ...

List slices in Python - 2 and 3 values forms, with an uplifting example

Python's lists are indexed collection objects. That means that they're rather like arrays in that you look up elements by their position numbers, and the number start at a fixed point (0 in the case ...

Passing parameters to Python functions - the options you have

Parameters to Python functions / methods are (by default) position dependent. If you def a function with 2 parameters, and call it with two, the first incoming address is taken as being the incoming ...

Do I need to initialise variables - programming in C, C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby or Java.

Starting with a clean slate. Are variables initisialised, and if so, how? Even with this fundamental question, languages vary considerably. C and C++ From my (e)mailbag ... """In a piece of code ...

All possible combinations from a list (Python) or array (Ruby)

If there are eight of us at a meeting, how many possibilities are there for a pair of people to stongly disagree? The answer turns out to be 28. And if you look at subgoups of 3, looking for everyone ...

Open Source (Public) courses - PHP, Tcl, SQL, Python, C and C++ in Melksham, Wiltshire, UK

Here's a revised list of public courses running at our Melksham training centre for the rest of this month, and in April and May. There are a couple of additions, and we've also reallocated a couple ...

Beware - a=a+b and a+=b are different - Python

It's commonly stated the the += operator is simply a more efficient and shorter to code alternative to using a + operator and saving back to the same variable ... in other words that ...

Insurance against any errors - Volcanoes and Python

Have you heard of people who have taken out insurance, only do discover that they're not covered for some eventuality - "but the list of circumstances doesn't include your flight being canceled ...

Rekeying a table - comparison in #Ruby #Perl and #Python

Albert knows Perl and Python, Barbara knows Lua and Ruby, Colin knows Perl, and Debbie is a dab hand at PHP. Eddie does Python, Perl and PHP and Fiona cooks a great dinner for Shrek. Gordon programs ...

Disassembling Python and Java - previously compiled code

Most modern languages translate the source code you give into an intermediate byte code prior to it being run, and in can sometimes be useful and instructive to reverse engineer the code to help to ...

Python dictionaries - mutable and immutable keys and values

Lists, Tuples, and dictionaries are the conventional collection variables in Python - but when you stop to consider it, objects and strings are collections too. All of these structures bundle ...

Steering our Python courses towards wxPython, SQLite and Django

With our modular courses that we write ourselves, we've well placed to move forward with technology; more often than not, what's needed is a series of gentle changes, adding in the occasional module ...

A framework with python - Django - first steps

What is Django and what do I need to be able to use it? Django is a framework - a tool that lets you create, customise, run and maintain web sites in which the data is stored in database tables. It ...

Lua, Tcl, Python; Worldwide training classes

The subjects we teach are used worldwide - there's just as much requirement to learn about Python in Salerno as there is in Swindon, about Tcl in Milwaukee as there is in Manchester, and about Lua in ...

Perl, Python, PHP, Lua, Linux, and more - and business hotel too. Menu for 2011

Whar are our plans for 2011? "Steady as she goes", I think - a gentle year of building on all we've achieved in the past year, and all that has developed in the last six months. Our hotel at Well ...

wxPython geometry - BoxSizer example

Rather than manually position each of your widgets in a window in wxPython, you can use a Sizer; there are various type of GridSizer that let you define rows and columns of widgets, and there's a ...

Python regular expressions - repeating, splitting, lookahead and lookbehind

If you're looking for part of a string that's repeated again later in the string, you can capture the first occurrence and then use a back reference (\1, \2 etc) to refer to "same again". In Python, ...

Sizers (geometry control) in a wxPython GUI - a first example

In all GUI (Graphic User Interfaces), you define components / widgets, you define how they're laid out, and you define what's to happen when an even occurs, such as a button is pressed. All this ...

Python - fresh examples from recent courses

During courses, I write a lot of examples in front of delegates so that the get to see both a program to perform a certain task and how that solution was reached - after all, they'll be expected to ...