Python Advanced Topics

I’ve heard that Python has an operator called ternary operator but I don’t know how to use it. What does the ternary operator do? The Python ternary operator (or conditional expression) works on three operands and allows to write the logic of an if else statement in a single line of code. With the ternary … Read more

Two keywords that often confuse beginner Python programmers are yield and return. Both of these keywords have a role to play in Python functions, but they serve different purposes. The return keyword is used to immediately return one or more values from a function in Python. The yield keyword when used in a function returns … Read more

One of the data types provided by Python is the NoneType which you might have found when coding in Python if you have seen the keyword None. NoneType is a Python data type that shows that an object has no value. None is the only object of type NoneType and you can use it to … Read more

Binary search is a well-known computer science algorithm you can implement in many languages including Python. It is an algorithm that allows finding elements in a sorted array. It is frequently brought up in programming competitions and technical interviews. You should always use existing libraries when performing binary search in Python or any other language. … Read more

In this tutorial we will create a stack in Python step-by-step. The stack is a LIFO (Last-in First-out) data structure. To create a stack in Python you can use a class with a single attribute of type list. The elements of the stack are stored in the list using the push method and are retrieved … Read more

The Python yield keyword is something that at some point you will encounter as developer. What is yield? How can you use it in your programs? The yield keyword is used to return a value to the caller of a Python function without losing the state of the function. When the function is called again … Read more

While reading a Python program you might find the expression if __name__ == ‘__main__’. Let’s have a look at what it means and why you should know about it. The condition if __name__ == ‘__main__’ is used in a Python program to execute the code inside the if statement only when the program is executed … Read more

Knowing how to execute a shell command in Python helps you create programs to automate tasks on your system. There are multiple ways to execute a shell command in Python. The simplest ones use the os.system and os.popen functions. The recommended module to run shell commands is the Python subprocess module due to its flexibility … Read more

Using args and kwargs can be quite cryptic especially if you are new to Python. Let’s find out together all you need to know about them. What are *args and **kwargs? *args and **kwargs allow to pass an arbitrary number of positional arguments (*args) and keyword arguments (**kwargs) to a Python function. You can use … Read more

A Python decorator is a feature (or design pattern) that allows to enhance the logic of functions, methods or classes without changing the original code. To represent a decorator in Python you can use the @ symbol followed by the name of the decorator. In this tutorial, we will go through 7 things you must … Read more