Python Tips

If your if-else statement is short and simple, you can condense it into one line for readability. 

It is common to use the if-else statements to execute multiple conditional statements.

In Python 3.10 and above, you can use the switch statement to do the same thing.

With the switch statement, you don’t need to repeat the same statements multiple times (food==x), which makes the code cleaner than using multiple if-else statements. 

My previous tips on good Python practices.

If you want to check whether two file paths are the same, use Path.samefile().

My previous tips on pathlib.

If you want to pad a Python string with zero, use f-string.

My previous tips on Python string.

If you want to get a list of random elements from a specific list, use random.choices. This method also allows you to weigh the possibility for each value with the weights parameter.

In the code above, I use random.choices to get a list of 10 random values. 0 is two times more likely to be selected than 1 and is ten times more likely to be selected than 2.

My previous tips on Python list.

In Python, you can compare and subtract dates using operators.  

dict.pop allows you to remove and return an item with the matching key from a dictionary. If a key doesn’t exist, you will get a KeyError.

To avoid this error, add a default value to the second argument of dict.pop.

My previous tips on Python dictionary.

The getattr(class, attribute_name) method gets the value of an attribute of a class. However, if the attribute is not found in a class, it returns the default value provided to the function.

If you want to combine multiple dictionaries into one unit, collections.ChainMap is a good option. ChainMap allows you to organize and get the keys or values across different dictionaries.

My previous tips on collections.

If you want to do calculations inside a Python string, use f-string.

My previous tips on string.