Filter out HTML tags and resolve entities in python
Because regular expressions scare me, I'm trying to find a way to remove all HTML tags and resolve HTML entities from a string in Python. ...
python
What's the easiest way to read a FoxPro DBF file from Python?
I've got a bunch of FoxPro (VFP9) DBF files on my Ubuntu system, is there a library to open these in Python? I only need to read them, and would preferably have access to the memo fields too. Update: Thanks @cnu, I used Yusdi Santoso's dbf.py and it works nicely. One gotcha: The memo file name extension must be lower case, i.e. .fpt, ...
How do you check in Linux with Python if a process is still running?
The only nice way I've found is: import sys import os try: os.kill(int(sys.argv[1]), 0) print "Running" except: print "Not running" (Source) But is this reliable? Does it work with every process and every distribution? ...
Why is the subprocess.Popen class not named Subprocess?
The primary class in the subprocess module is name Popen, and represents a subprocess. Popen sounds like someone was trying to force the name to follow some function naming format, rather than chosing a name that actually represents what the object is. Does anyone know why it was chosen over something simple like, say, Subprocess? ...
What are Class methods in Python for?
I'm teaching myself Python and my most recent lesson was that Python is not Java, and so I've just spent a while turning all my Class methods into functions. I now realise that I don't need to use Class methods for what I would done with static methods in Java, but now I'm not sure when I would use them. All the advice I can find about...
Why is Lua considered a game language?
Why is Lua considered a game language? I have been learning about Lua in the past month and I'm absolutely in love with the language, but all I see around that is built with Lua are games. I mean, the syntax is very simple, there is no fuss, no special meaning characters that makes code look like regular expressions, has all the good th...
Retrieving an Oracle timestamp using Python's Win32 ODBC module
Given an Oracle table created using the following: CREATE TABLE Log(WhenAdded TIMESTAMP(6) WITH TIME ZONE); Using the Python ODBC module from its Win32 extensions (from the win32all package), I tried the following: import dbi, odbc connection = odbc.odbc("Driver=Oracle in OraHome92;Dbq=SERVER;Uid=USER;Pwd=PASSWD") cursor = connecti...
What's the best way to return multiple values from a function in Python?
I have a function where I need to do something to a string. I need the function to return a boolean indicating whether or not the operation succeeded, and I also need to return the modified string. In C#, I would use an out parameter for the string, but there is no equivalent in Python. I'm still very new to Python and the only thin...
Using Django time/date widgets in custom form
How can I use the nifty JavaScript date and time widgets that the default admin uses with my custom view? I have looked through http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/forms/, and it brefly mentions django.contrib.admin.widgets, but I don't know how to use it? Here is my template that I want it applied on. <form action="." meth...
How can I merge two Python dictionaries as a single expression?
I have two Python dictionaries, and I want to write a single expression that returns these two dictionaries, merged. The update() method would be what I need, if it returned its result instead of modifying a dict in-place. >>> x = {'a':1, 'b': 2} >>> y = {'b':10, 'c': 11} >>> z = x.update(y) >>> print z None >>> x {'a': 1, 'b': 10, 'c'...
Screencasts for Django/Python?
I am doing a series of Django screencasts. I am just curious: what kind of topics do you want to see covered in relation to Django or Python? ...
Search and replace a line in a file in Python
I want to loop over the contents of a text file and do a search and replace on some lines and write the result back to the file. I could first load the whole file in memory and then write it back, but that probably is not the best way to do it. What is the best way to do this, within the following code? f = open(file) for line in f: ...
Finding a file in a Python module distribution
I've written a Python package that includes a bsddb database of pre-computed values for one of the more time-consuming computations. For simplicity, my setup script installs the database file in the same directory as the code which accesses the database (on Unix, something like /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/mypackage/). How do I sto...
What is the best way to do Bit Field manipulation in Python?
I'm reading some MPEG Transport Stream protocol over UDP and it has some funky bitfields in it (length 13 for example). I'm using the "struct" library to do the broad unpacking, but is there a simple way to say "Grab the next 13 bits" rather than have to hand-tweak the bit manipulation? I'd like something like the way C does bit fields (...
Using C in a shared multi-platform POSIX environment.
I write tools that are used in a shared workspace. Since there are multiple OS's working in this space, we generally use Python and standardize the version that is installed across machines. However, if I wanted to write some things in C, I was wondering if maybe I could have the application wrapped in a Python script, that detected the ...
PGP signatures from Python?
What is the easiest way to create and verify PGP/GPG signatures from within a Python application? I can call pgp or gpg using subprocess and parse the output, but I was looking for a way that didn't require an external program to be installed (my application is cross-platform mac/windows/unix). ...
javascript locals()?
In python one can get a dictionary of all local and global variables in the current scope with the built-in functions locals() and globals(). Is there some equivalent way of doing this in javascript? For instance, I would like to do something like the following: var foo = function(){ alert('foo'); }; var bar = function(){ alert('bar')...
cx_Oracle: how do I get the ORA-xxxxx error number?
In a try/except block, how do I extract the Oracle error number? ...
Python deployment and /usr/bin/env portability
At the beginning of all my executable Python scripts I put the shebang line: #!/usr/bin/env python I'm running these scripts on a system where env python yields a Python 2.2 environment. My scripts quickly fail because I have a manual check for a compatible Python version: if sys.version_info < (2, 4): raise ImportError("Cannot r...
Always including the user in the django template context
I am working on a small intranet site for a small company, where user should be able to post. I have imagined a very simple authentication mechanism where people just enter their email address, and gets sent a unique login url, that sets a cookie that will always identify them for future requests. In my template setup, I have base.html,...