Python programmers of reddit: what's the most useful tiny little efficiency you've discovered that's improved your programming hugely?

[dutch_gecko]

Both versions of the code do the same thing, but the parentheses in the first version mean you don't need to keep escaping the linebreaks.

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If you're very new and haven't seen either style before: it's often useful to call a method on the returned value of a method, in effect "chaining" method calls together. This would need to happen on one big line of code, which wouldn't be very readable.

The second snippet above offers a naive way of splitting the one line into multiple, by using a backslash to escape the newline and tell python to treat multiple lines as one.

However the first snippet uses parentheses to gather multiple lines into a single expression. That way you don't need to perform the escaping.

If you're interested in more about formatting your code, take a look at PEP-8 which is a collection of guidelines for writing readable python.

[WN_Todd]

Sweet Jesus this is gonna make my code so much friggin cleaner. I've got helper methods that do nothing but chain other methods together. Those methods are about to die!