Category Archives: Python3

Python 3 File Paths

Associate Instructor at Feabhas Ltd
An independent IT trainer Martin has over 40 years academic and commercial experience in open systems software engineering. He has worked with a range of technologies from real time process controllers, through compilers, to large scale parallel processing systems; and across multiple sectors including industrial systems, semi-conductor manufacturing, telecomms, banking, MoD, and government.
Martin Bond
Latest posts by Martin Bond (see all)

If you’ve used Python for a while you will probably be familiar with the os module for working with files and directories; often called pathnames by Linux users. In moving to Python 3 you may continue to use the same os and os.path functions from Python 2.7, however a new pathlib module provides an alternative object-oriented (OO) approach.

In this posting, we examine the common file handling situations; comparing the OO approach of pathlib against the procedural approach of os functions.

Current […]

Posted in Python, Python3 | Leave a comment

Python 3 Unicode and Byte Strings

Associate Instructor at Feabhas Ltd
An independent IT trainer Martin has over 40 years academic and commercial experience in open systems software engineering. He has worked with a range of technologies from real time process controllers, through compilers, to large scale parallel processing systems; and across multiple sectors including industrial systems, semi-conductor manufacturing, telecomms, banking, MoD, and government.
Martin Bond
Latest posts by Martin Bond (see all)

A notable difference between Python 2 and Python 3 is that character data is stored using Unicode instead of bytes. It is quite likely that when migrating existing code and writing new code you may be unaware of this change as most string algorithms will work with either type of representation; but you cannot intermix the two.

If you are working with web service libraries such as urllib (formerly urllib2) and requests, network sockets, binary files, or serial I/O with pySerial  […]

Posted in Python, Python3 | 2 Comments

Python 3 Type Hints

Associate Instructor at Feabhas Ltd
An independent IT trainer Martin has over 40 years academic and commercial experience in open systems software engineering. He has worked with a range of technologies from real time process controllers, through compilers, to large scale parallel processing systems; and across multiple sectors including industrial systems, semi-conductor manufacturing, telecomms, banking, MoD, and government.
Martin Bond
Latest posts by Martin Bond (see all)

The expected end of support for Python 2.7 is 1st January 2020, at least according to Guido van Rossum’s blog post. Starting now, you should consider developing all new Python applications in Python 3, and migrating existing code to Python 3 as and when time and workload permit.

Moving to Python 3

If you are unaware of the changes introduced in Python 3 that broke backward compatibility with Python 2 then there is a good summary on this What’s New In Python […]

Posted in Python, Python3, Testing | Leave a comment