5 Python tricks for Data Monkeys

With learning points for beginner/intermediate level coders

Image by Author with a little help from DALL-E: “A Data Monkey playing with Python”

I learnt a lot from a recent data-wrangling challenge and thought what was interesting and new to me might just be worth sharing with other Python people, and although the “tricks” promised in the title might seem a bit disconnected, they actually all arose from the same, common use case: take the output of someone else’s web scrapers and merge them into an existing database.

This article touches on quite a few intermediate level Python concepts which you might want to read up on separately if they don’t already make sense to you. Knowing the right buzz-words is often half the battle, so here’s a quick summary of what’s coming up:

• Function Chaining
• Lambda Functions
• Context Managers
• The Pathlib Module
• Wrapping Functions
• Monkey Patching
• Object Orientated Programming (Classes, Objects, and .attributes)
• The property keyword
• sorted() versus .sort()
• Dictionary Comprehensions

Sounds daunting? It’s really not… Unlike some theory based tutorials that take you through every aspect of a particular…