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Python provides a very powerful logging library in its standard library. A lot of programmers use print statements for debugging (myself included), but you can also use logging to do this. It’s actually cleaner to use logging as you won’t have to go through all your code to remove the print statements. In this tutorial we’ll cover the following topics: Creating a simple logger How to log from mult

Python comes with a lot of cool concurrency tools builtin, such as threads, Queues, semaphores and multiprocessing. In this article, we’ll spend some time learning how to use Queues. A Queue can be used for first-in-first out or last-in-last-out stack-like implementations if you just use them directly. If you’d like to see that in action, see the Hellman article at the end of this post. We’re goin

Today we’ll be looking at a simple PDF generation library called pyfpdf, a port of FPDF which is a php library. This is not a replacement for Reportlab, but it does give you more than enough to create simple PDFs and may meet your needs. Let’s take a look and see what it can do! Note: PyFPDF is no longer maintained. It has been replaced with fpdf2 Installing pyfpdf You can just use pip to install

A couple years ago I wrote a rather flawed tutorial about SQLAlchemy. I decided it was about time for me to re-do that tutorial from scratch and hopefully do a better job of it this time around. Since I’m a music nut, we’ll be creating a simple database to store album information. A database isn’t a database without some relationships, so we’ll create two tables and connect them. Here are a few ot

Downloading files from the internet is something that almost every programmer will have to do at some point. Python provides several ways to do just that in its standard library. Probably the most popular way to download a file is over HTTP using the urllib or urllib2 module. Python also comes with ftplib for FTP downloads. Finally there’s a new 3rd party module that’s getting a lot of buzz called

A couple years ago I started a series of articles on XML parsing. I covered lxml’s etree and Python’s included minidom XML parsing library. For whatever reason I didn’t notice lxml’s objectify sub-package, but I saw it recently and decided I should check it out. To my mind, the objectify module seems to be even more “Pythonic” than etree is. Let’s take a some time and go over my old XML examples u

Python code testing is something new to me. It’s not required where I work, so I haven’t spent much time looking into it, besides reading a book on the subject and reading a few blogs. However, I decided it was high time I check this out and see what all the excitement is about. In this article, you will learn about Test Driven Development (TDD) with Python using Python’s builtin unittest module.

Accessing databases with Python is a simple process. Python even provides a sqlite database library that’s built into the main distribution (since 2.5). My favorite way to access databases with Python is to use the 3rd party package, SqlAlchemy. SqlAlchemy is an object-relational mapper (ORM), which means that it takes SQL constructs and makes them more like the target language. In this case, you

If you use GUIs in Python much, then you know that sometimes you need to execute some long running process every now and then. Of course, if you do that as you would with a command line program, then you’ll be in for a surprise. In most cases, you’ll end up blocking your GUI’s event loop and the user will see your program freeze. What can you do to get around just mishaps? Start the task in anothe

Last month I wrote a post about getting Windows system information and I mentioned in one of my comments that there was another script that did some of this as well as other stuff, but I couldn’t find it. Well, today I went digging for it and found the script I wanted. So we’re going back down the rabbit hole for some more tips and tricks for getting information about the wonderful world of Window

At my job, I do a fair amount of system administration scripting in Python. For example, almost all the login scripts are written in Python (with some of them ported from Kixtart). Over the years, I’ve been tasked with creating shortcuts to new applications that need to be placed on the user’s desktop or in their Start Menu or both. In this article, I will show you how to accomplish this task. Not