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Posts by Karl Knechtel
There's still time This scenario is not yet a problem for this site, but we will get there, since it's a huge problem for Stack Overflow This topic should be separately addressed, too. At ti...
I know that I can display a single string in the terminal window like print("example") (or similarly with a string in a variable), and I know how to open text files and write to them. I also know ...
Using the write method The write method of a file offers a much more limited interface. It only accepts one argument - a string, for a file opened in text mode - and outputs just what it's given. ...
Background This is inspired to some extent by https://software.codidact.com/posts/289597 . I'm trying to provide a large amount of content (gradually!) that novices (mainly to Python) will find u...
Starting up Python There are several key ways to use the python command from the command line: python by itself starts a REPL that allows typing in and running Python code on the fly, one sta...
Understanding distutils and setuptools: the history The short version of "why does installing Setuptools fix the problem?" is that Setuptools provides its own distutils package, overriding anythin...
Generallly (assuming no exploit is found) it's not possible to escalate the privileges of an already running process, except via code that itself has kernel level access (running in ring 0 - this i...
This question is inspired by If I have a char array containing strings with a null byte (\0) terminating each string, how would I add another string onto the end? on Stack Overflow. Suppose I have...
The raise statement in Python accepts either an Exception class or an instance of that class. When used with a class, Python will create and raise an instance by passing no arguments to the constru...
Command-line timing Rather than using separate code for timing, I tried running the timeit module as a command-line tool. I wrote initial versions of the implementations based on the OP and hkotsu...
Sometimes code needs to assign (or otherwise use) a value that depends on some condition. The naive approach is to use explicit branching, which in Python would look like: if some_condition(): ...
Are books special? When I see a question like this, I naturally transform it into a more general question about resources. Printed books aren't necessarily the best way to learn about programming ...
I struggle to think of any use cases for merging from. Why was the merge command designed this way? The model here is that many developers on the same project are using branches to develop fea...
Suppose I have some variables like: >>> count = 8 >>> status = 'off' I want to combine them with some hard-coded text, to get a single string like 'I have 8 cans of Spam®; b...
First store the universe of potential elements as a sequence, then encode each set as an unsigned integer interpreted as follows: if the 1s bit in binary is set (1), the set contains the 0th elemen...
PEP 8 Four-space indentation is the community standard. There are many strategies for wrapping long lines; I have found that it's often best to just use temporary variables to avoid wrapping lines...
I need to do a lot of calculations involving sets. There are relatively few values in the "universe" of candidates that could appear in any of the sets, but potentially very many such sets (they mi...
Here is my current thinking on the matter. Regarding questions/facets that are "two sides of the same coin" - encoding vs decoding the data, reading vs. writing files - I think they should be ...
Sometimes when I try to install a third-party library for Python, I get an error saying that either distutils, or some part of it like distutils.core or distutils.util, could not be found. It's sho...
Conceptually, applying a function along an axis of a DataFrame (i.e., applying it to each row or column) inherently produces a Series: a two-dimensional result is collapsed to a one-dimensional res...
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