My current editor (Kate) has been configured to introduce a line break on word boundaries whenever the line length reaches or exceeds 80 characters. This makes it immediately obvious that I’ve overstepped the bounds. In addition, there is a red line marking the 80 character position, giving me advance warning of when the line is … Read more
It’s important to remember that PEP8 is only a guideline and even states that there are times when the rules should be broken. But most importantly: know when to be inconsistent — sometimes the style guide just doesn’t apply. With that in mind, I would probably write this with old style line continuation: def afunc(some_param_name): … Read more
In Python 2, you can use the types module: >>> import types >>> var = 1 >>> NumberTypes = (types.IntType, types.LongType, types.FloatType, types.ComplexType) >>> isinstance(var, NumberTypes) True Note the use of a tuple to test against multiple types. Under the hood, IntType is just an alias for int, etc.: >>> isinstance(var, (int, long, float, complex)) … Read more
My reading of the documentation suggests that 2 and 3 are both acceptable, but it looks like 2 is preferred (I say this because it looks like 2 vs. 3 is handled this way in the examples, I don’t think that the style specification is very specific here). 1 is out (look at the docs … Read more
PEP 8 recommends using parenthesis so that you don’t need \, and gently suggests breaking before binary operators instead of after them. Thus, the preferred way of formatting you code is like this: my_var = (somethinglikethis .where(we=do_things) .where(we=domore) .where(we=everdomore)) The two relevant passages are this one from the Maximum Line Length section: The preferred way … Read more
“\d” is same as “\\d” because there’s no escape sequence for d. But it is not clear for the reader of the code. But, consider \t. “\t” represent tab chracter, while r”\t” represent literal \ and t character. So use raw string when you mean literal \ and d: re.compile(r”\d{3}”) or escape backslash explicitly: re.compile(“\\d{3}”)
Two blank lines between the import statements and other code. Two blank lines between each function.
Trailing whitespace is any spaces or tabs after the last non-whitespace character on the line until the newline. In your posted question, there is one extra space after try:, and there are 12 extra spaces after pass: >>> post_text=””‘\ … if self.tagname and self.tagname2 in list1: … try: … question = soup.find(“div”, “post-text”) … title … Read more
The PEP8 guide you quote suggests that it is okay to use a bare exception in your case provided you are logging the errors. I would think that you should cover as many exceptions as you can/know how to deal with and then log the rest and pass, e.g. import logging list_of_functions = [f_a,f_b,f_c] for … Read more
Everyone else uses 4 spaces. That is the only reason to use 4 spaces that I’ve come across and accepted. In my heart, I still want to use tabs (1 indent character per indent, makes sense, no? Separate indent from other whitespace. I don’t care that tabs can be displayed as different widths, that makes … Read more