Often I find myself writing Python scripts to iterate over the files in a directory for fun and profit. This is so common that I wrote a simple helper function in Auxly called walkfiles(). The performance of walkfiles() always felt kinda sluggish, especially when compared to blazing fast utilities like fd. Only recently did I learn about os.scandir() in the Python standard library which is essentially a more performant os.listdir(). After some benchmarks …

PopPage is a small side project I started a few years but haven't really updated much until recently. PopPage was originally a simple static HTML generator; at the time I just needed a utility to apply content to Jinja2 templates. However, recent updates have effectively made it a cookiecutter clone with a few neat features. Unlike cookiecutter, PopPage information is supplied from YAML files rather than JSON files. As of PopPage 0.3.1, there …

Qprompt is a simple CLI library for Python that I have slowly working on for about two years now. It provides basic typed prompts and menus in a CLI environment along with some additional convenience functions. Recently, I added a feature that allows prompt inputs to be automatically entered via stdin; I have found this feature to be enormously helpful. Let's look at an example use case.

Use Case - QuickWin Build Menu

QuickWin is another …

While looking over robot simulator options, ran across V-REP which looked interesting. After reading through some of the great documentation, I wanted to give the remote API a try so I threw together a basic demo of a line following robot with logic implemented in Python. The demo is available on GitHub here. Hoping to try some more complex projects in V-REP soon!

While mostly straightforward and simple, Python still has its share of gotchas and gremlins, one such explored in this post. Familiarizing yourself with common gotchas can help avoid issues and aid debugging.

Articles:

• The 10 Most Common Mistakes That Python Developers Make - Earlier versions of my Qprompt library suffered from mistake #1 (facepalm!). In my defense, there may be a violation of the principle of least astonishment here. However, I also understand that changing the …

NOTE: This is an update to a previous post.

The following can be used to programmatically set stdin for testing under Python 3.x:

import sys
from io import StringIO
sys.stdin = StringIO()
setinput = lambda x: [
        sys.stdin.seek(0),
        sys.stdin.truncate(0),
        sys.stdin.write(x),
        sys.stdin.seek(0)]

Here is a quick example of using setinput() in Python 3.x:

setinput("Jeff")
name = input("Enter name:")
print(name)

Found out the hard way that certain versions of Vim are not compatible with certain versions of Python. I keep my installation of Vim 7.3.712 on Dropbox so I can use it across multiple computers. While trying to run gVim on a new PC with Python 2.7.11 installed, gVim would close without warning or an error message when trying to open files.

Found out the cause was the one plugin I …

NOTE: The information in this post applies to Python 2.x only. See this post for Python 3.x support.

While working on Qprompt (a Python CLI based user input libary), I wanted to write some tests to check for regressions. The following lambda function allows stdin to be programmatically set:

import StringIO, sys
sys.stdin = StringIO.StringIO()
setinput = lambda x: [sys.stdin.truncate(0), sys.stdin.write(x), sys.stdin.seek(0)]

The following …