Posts tagged Python

Sometimes you want to profile just a single function in your Python program. Here's a module that lets you do just that: profilehooks.py. Sample usage: #!/usr/bin/python from profilehooks import profile class SampleClass: def silly_fibonacci_example(self, n): """Return the n-th Fibonacci number. This is a method rather rather than a function just to illustrate that you can use the 'profile' decorator on methods as well as global functions. Needless to say, this is a contrived example.

Say you are comparing two large dicts in a unit test, for example: form = extract_form(rendered_html) self.assertEquals(form, {'field1': u'value1', 'field2': u'value2', ... 'field42': u'value42'}) When this test fails, a useful trick is to ask the test runner to drop into Pdb inside assertEquals (SchoolTool and Zope 3 test runners have a command line option -d for this) and type the following: (Pdb) from sets import Set (Pdb) pp list(Set(first.

During the PyPy sprint I've noticed that there are a lot of good development tools that people do not know about. There are also extremely convenient features of other tools that are also unknown. I think I should mention a few of them: VIM Vim is a very powerful text editor. It takes some getting used to, but that time is well worth the increased productivity you get as a result.

I spent the last week participating in a PyPy sprint. It was fun. I've learned a lot of obscure Python tricks that I'll try to avoid in the future if I do not want my code to be obscure. I had the chance to see how graphviz and Pygame can be combined into a very easy and pleasant to use debugging tool for looking at intricate data structures. Best of all -- I met a number of fine Python programmers: Armin Rigo, Holger Krekel, Michael Hudson, Bob Ippolito, Christian Tismer, Laura Creighton, Jacob Hallen.

Mailman is a wonderful mailing list manager, but when you have thousands of spam messages sitting in the moderation queue, it's web interface is not enough. The messages live as Python pickles on the file system, in the mailman data directory. The file name pattern is heldmsg-listname-number.pck. Newer versions of Mailman1 come with a script discard that takes a list of path names on the command line and discards them all.