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Louie provides Python programmers with a straightforward way to dispatch signals between objects in a wide variety of contexts. It is based on PyDispatcher, which in turn was based on a highly-rated recipe in the Python Cookbook. Louie is licensed under The BSD License.

def comb(items, n=None): if n is None: n = len(items) for i in range(len(items)): v = items[i:i+1] if n == 1: yield v else: rest = items[i+1:] for c in comb(rest, n-1): yield v + c

def perm(items, n=None): if n is None: n = len(items) for i in range(len(items)): v = items[i:i+1] if n == 1: yield v else: rest = items[:i] + items[i+1:] for p in perm(rest, n-1): yield v + p

Permutation and Combination Enumerator

import win32api import win32com.client shell = win32com.client.Dispatch("WScript.Shell") shell.Run("calc") win32api.Sleep(100) shell.AppActivate("Calculator") win32api.Sleep(100) shell.SendKeys("1{+}") win32api.Sleep(500) shell.SendKeys("2") win32api.Sleep(500) shell.SendKeys("~") # ~ is the same as {ENTER} win32api.Sleep(500) shell.SendKeys("*3") win32api.Sleep(500) shell.SendKeys("~") win32api.Sleep(2500)

Sometimes you get an Excel spreadsheet (say, from the marketing departement) and you want to read tabular data from it (i.e. a line with column headers and lines of data). There are many ways to do this (including ODBC + mxODBC), but the easiest way I've found is this one : provide a file name and a sheet name, and read the data !

What idioms should I use to make my code easier to read? Read "The Python Cookbook", especially the first few chapters. It's a great source of well-written Python code examples.

Use function factories to create utility functions. Often, especially if you're using map and filter a lot, you need utility functions that convert other functions or methods to taking a single parameter. In particular, you often want to bind some data to the function once, and then apply it repeatedly to different objects. In the above example, we needed a function that multiplied a particular field of an object by 3, but what we really want is a factory that's able to return for any field name and amount a multiplier function in that family:

Use zip and dict to map fields to names. zip turns a pair of sequences into a list of tuples containing the first, second, etc. values from each sequence. For example, zip('abc', [1,2,3]) == [('a',1),('b',2),('c',3)]. You can use this to save a lot of typing when you have fields in a known order that you want to map to names: