A Caffeinated Crash Course in Python

Python is not.
Java C Perl

The Python Interpreter

Type python at the command prompt In windows, find the python icon on the start menu

Dir and Help

help()

dir()

Syntax Errors
Python Errors show the line number of the error Check the line above if your error makes no sense

White Space

String Basics
Not a mutable data type

String can be delimited with either the or

More Strings
Concatenation uses the +

You can do math with strings!

Output

Indexing
To index into a string, specify the position inside square brackets

You can index into a string from the end of the string.

Slicing
A Substring of a string is a slice

Your head or tail can be a negative index

More Slicing
You dont need to specify the beginning and end of the string

Find the length of a string with len()

Example

Lists
Lists in python are made of any data type delimited by commas and surrounded by brackets.

Lists are mutable

More on Lists
You can index into lists

You can slice lists

Modifying Lists
You can add lists

And append to them

List Methods

sort - sorts the list in place, returns nothing sorted - does not modify the list, returns new sorted list reverse - reverses the list in place, returns nothing

String Formatting

The % operator substitutes values into a string %s and %d are placeholders for the values (%d makes sure its a number) %s has %d letters % (colorless, len(colorless)) becomes the string colorless has 9 letters

Converting from Strings to Lists

Join a list to make a string

Split a string to make a list

For and If
If statements

For Statements

List Comprehensions
Applies a function to every element of a list

Dictionaries
Hash - maps things to things!

Even More Dictionaries

Example: Letter Frequencies

Classes

Importing and the Python path

Import using the import command You can import everything from a module using the syntax from <module> import *

Files
Filename = /home/havasi/input.txt input = open(Filename, r) output = open(Filename + .out, w) for line in input.readlines(): input.write(Cows! \n) input.close() output.close()

Resources
Python.org NLTK Python Tutorial
http://nltk.org/doc/en/programming.html

IDLE (Windows Development Env.)

http://www.python.org/idle/